About
Michael serves as the head of Hilgers Graben’s Corporate and Transactional practice. Drawing upon years of investigation and antitrust experience from early in his career, Michael advises companies and organizations in the US and Japan on complex commercial real estate and corporate transactions, including entity setup and governance issues, asset and equity transactions, and real estate transactions. In his commercial real estate practice, Michael represents and advises owners, developers, landlords, and tenants on all aspects of the leasing, purchase and sale of real property.
Early in his career, Michael spent years dealing with complex antitrust and investigation cases, including the unprecedented In Re Auto Parts Antitrust Litigation MDL, which recovered more than $1.2 billion in settlements for victims of a long-running price-fixing, bid-rigging, and market allocation conspiracies throughout the global auto parts industry. Emerging from the largest criminal antitrust investigation in U.S. history, it included 41 separate actions against more than 160 defendants, each involving different auto parts, different anticompetitive agreements, different conspirators, and different timelines.
This extensive experience in Japanese eDiscovery, managing first level document review teams, overseeing document collection and production, and deposition prep and support in both the US and Japan now enables Michael to add significant value to his US and Japanese clients conducting transactions, due diligence or investigations with Japanese language data and documents.
Prior to practicing law, Michael was selected to the Japanese Ministry of Education’s JET Program where he earned an Advanced Japanese Linguistics certificate and afterwards worked at the State of Nebraska Office of Economic Development managing the state’s trade office in Tokyo, Japan and was instrumental in establishing Nebraska’s trade office in Shanghai, China.
