Masuda Funai's practice focuses on representing international companies operating and investing in the United States. We provide legal services customized for global companies with U.S. ventures or subsidiaries to assist those clients in addressing such critical business needs as establishing a U.S. company, negotiating U.S. contracts, managing U.S. employees and asserting or defending a company's rights in the U.S. For example, the following are a representative sample of the essential cross-border services we provide.

• Negotiating international joint ventures.
• Prosecuting and defending claims in international arbitrations and lawsuits.
• Advising clients of U.S. laws and regulations affecting international commerce such as transfer pricing, dumping and anti-trust.
• Assisting clients in assuring that their products conform with U.S. energy, environmental and safety standards.
• Assisting companies to avoid claims from product liability.
• Alerting and educating clients regarding sensitive personnel matters, such as sexual harassment, discrimination and employee benefits.
• Providing immigration counseling.
• Providing estate and tax planning for expatriate executives.

Many of our attorneys and staff have international backgrounds and have lived, studied or worked abroad. A number of our attorneys have spent several months abroad working as in-house counsel for some of our international clients, and several attorneys travel frequently throughout the world to work on various projects and cases. We speak a variety of languages, including Croatian, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Spanish, Russian and Ukrainian. We also maintain a network of global contacts in the legal, business and accounting fields to assist us in representing our clients. Since 1987, Masuda Funai has sponsored a Japanese visiting attorney, who joins the firm as part of the Japan Resources Group. In 2003, we sponsored our first Malaysian visiting attorney.