DLA Piper has deepened its finance practice bench in Tokyo with the addition of senior counsel Masahiro Wakabayashi, former general counsel and head of compliance of Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley PB Securities.
Wakabayashi focuses on finance and specialises in advising on matters including regulatory and compliance for investment banking, private banking and wealth management, as well as derivatives and markets transactions, power plant infrastructure and real estate investments.
The veteran finance lawyer began his legal career as an attorney at Mitsui, Yasuda, Wani & Maeda in 1995 in Tokyo, and later at Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu, one of Japan’s four biggest law firms. After eight years in private practice, he started his journey as an in-house lawyer in 2004 by joining Deutsche Bank, where he served as counsel and vice president.
Between 2005 and 2016, he had worked as associate general counsel at Merrill Lynch Japan Securities for seven years and assistant general counsel at JPMorgan Securities Japan for four years in Tokyo. In 2019, he left his role of three years as group general counsel of IDI Infrastructures, a Japanese fund, to join Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley PB Securities.
Besides his decades-long senior in-house legal roles, he has advised the Japanese government on legislation including the Civil Rehabilitation Law and the Small and Medium Enterprise Investment Limited Liability Partnership Act.
