Hiroaki MATSUNAGA

Introduction

Hiroaki Matsunaga, a partner at City-Yuwa Partners, specialises in transportation and logistics law, competition law, corporate compliance and commercial litigation.

An expert in antitrust and competition law, he has extensive experience across the field, including M&A, cartels and the abuse of superior bargaining positions. He has successfully obtained clearance from the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) on multiple occasions for complex mergers where the post-merger market share exceeded 50%. Economists highly regard his method of thoroughly discussing the content and geographical scope of the industry with clients, and then independently analysing statistics and maps to develop various hypotheses.

He has also recently developed expertise in analysing business and commercial law related to domestic logistics and transportation. His perspective on issues relating to transportation regulations, antitrust and subcontracting law has attracted the attention of shippers and e-commerce operators. His unique insights have also caught the attention of the media and the JFTC. He has authored numerous articles on competition and antitrust law, and he is frequently sought out for comments by newspapers. The government is particularly referring to his analysis when developing legal theories to solve the difficulties of last-mile delivery. As there are few lawyers well-versed in transportation law who can communicate in English, startups looking to expand their transportation business from overseas to Japan rely on him.

He has also handled multiple investigations by Japanese and foreign authorities, and multilateral development banks, including responding to government investigations into cartels. He defends not only corporations but also individuals who are the subject of investigations.

Matsunaga graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo and completed his graduate studies at the University of Tokyo Law School. He was admitted to the Japanese bar in 2007. After working at Nishimura & Asahi, he joined City-Yuwa, where he currently practises. He holds an LLM in competition law from New York University, where he served as a research assistant to the American legal scholar Professor Eleanor M Fox. He was admitted to the New York Bar in 2017.