PARTNER

As a California State Attorney based in Silicon Valley, Robert Lott has a great deal of experience in a wide range of areas such as industry legal affairs, international transactions, financial transactions, corporate acquisition, and investment. For over 18 years, he has provided legal services for public-sector organizations, private enterprises, ventures, and startups while taking a serious stance on supporting Japanese enterprises in developing overseas.

Robert has extensively provided legal advice and services on strategies of international M & A, financial arrangements, and technology licensing for companies to accomplish their goals. The following are the major cases in which he engaged:

• Legal affairs as a company lawyer for the venture capital, SVIC;
• M & A for ArcSight (Acquired by HP for 1.5 billion USD in 2010) and Cloudshield (Acquired by SAIC for 2 million USD);
• Support in designing strategic scheme sponsored by Benchmark Capital UK (Currently Balderton Capital) and 3i; and,
• Operation and legal affairs as the president and in-house lawyer of Pluginz, which was a software plug-in aggregator later acquired by Toolfarm.

Furthermore, Robert served as a counsel for Guardian Advisors as well as a representative of investors arbitrating FINRA corporation securities in order to execute investors’ right against share-issuing companies, fund managers, and financial advisors. Most recently he was a counsel for Blackbox Accelerator to support GoDaddy in acquiring a portfolio company, M Dot (NYSE: GDDY). Also, he is serves as a co-founder and general counsel of Vq Research, which is a Silicon Valley based company that is pioneering rapid prototyping and manufacturing of a variety of products and components within the domains of microelectronics, medical devices, inverters, low and high voltage MLCCs, and others using novel 3D printing technology.

Based in Silicon Valley, Takuya has been involved in international legal affairs based on 20 years of his experience in such practical businesses as international corporate legal affairs, international commercial trades, immigration, financial arrangements, and licensing processes for Canadian and Japanese clients. As a bilingual international legal counsellor, he has a detailed knowledge of legal affairs related to community enterprises and NPO as well as ventures, start-ups, and companies that expand their business to US.

Among his major cases, Takuya engaged in legal affairs related to operations of Pacific Net, which is listed on the NASDAQ exchange, when the enterprise expanded its business to Japan. He was in charge of M & A after contacting and contracting with an alliance company in the country.

Also, when engaging in financial arrangements for a U.S.-based Ramen noodle manufacturer, Nippon Trends Food Service to expand its business to Canada and to establish a new factory, Takuya successfully arranged 600 million JPY from a government-controlled bank during a year of preliminary period. In the engagement, he obtained a working permit for its employees and received government approvals and licenses (for trading, health and safety, constructing factories, and sales) and enabled the company to start manufacturing after 6 months.

Furthermore, collaborating with an attorney against a case of 1 billion yen that their compensation insurance could not cover, Takuya negotiated with the labor court and intervened in the insurance company to have it to compensate the payment. Adequately accepting aggregation of the client, the collaboration adopted alternative dispute resolution (ADR) to successfully decrease the payment to 50 million yen and prevented insurance cost from increasing.

Takuya has taken up a post as the representative of the Japan branch of Shepherdman Law Office in order to accelerate business of and to promote the globalization of Japanese clients.