Drivers of change in legal services and legal education

Hideaki Roy Umetsu is a partner at Mori Hamada & Matsumoto. He focuses on international and domestic M&A transactions, global compliance matters, including anti-corruption complaince, internal investigation, or corporate govenance for oversea subsidiaries. He also gives advice on export controls and other trade-related matters. He was admitted to the bars in Japan (2004) and New York (2010). Umetsu was educated at the University of Tokyo (LL.B., 2003) and the University of Chicago Law School (LL.M., 2009). From 2006 to 2007, he worked as an associate director at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan, and he also worked as a foreign associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell from 2009 to 2010.

Maria José Esteban is an adjunct professor at IE Law School, a senior research fellow at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, and a partner at the Spanish law firm Escura. Esteban’s research interests are focused on strategic quality management and innovation in law firms, as well as on the social, economic, and regulatory analysis of the legal profession. She publishes in leading scholarly journals and is a frequent speaker at professional and academic conferences. She is a corporate lawyer included in the Best Lawyers list for Spain since 2010, with more than twenty years of international experience. Holds a Ph.D. summa cum laude in Business Administration, and is a numerary member of the Royal European Academy of Doctors.

I am a foreign attorney at Bae, Kim & Lee LLC. Previously worked at Clifford Chance US LLP and Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP. My focus is in M&A, primarily on cross border and private equity transactions.

Hanim is KPMG Law’s Asia Pacific Regional Leader for Legal Services. She also heads the Corporate M&A practice group at KPMG Law Indonesia. Currently based in Singapore, her global experience includes being resident in the UK, Malaysia, Japan, the US and Indonesia. She has 28+ years of practice specialization having worked on major infrastructure, project financing and M&A transactions in the aviation, banking, insurance, energy, plantations, and real estate sectors. She is also well-versed in cross-border securitization deals, structured financial products, and Islamic finance, having represented the interests of investors from Asia, the US, UK, and Europe in key onshore and offshore multi-currency transactions. Professional and industry experience Hanim is top ranked, consistently recognized as a Distinguished Practitioner or Leading Lawyer across multiple practice areas in major legal publications and directories including Asialaw Profiles, Asia Business Law Journal, IFLR1000, Legal 500 and In-house Community Counsel. Hanim was also named Top Ten Pioneers of New Legal Thinking by the Financial Times Asia-Pacific Innovative Lawyers Awards 2018. Asia Business Law Journal named Hanim as Singapore’s Top 100 Lawyers for two years in a row, in 2023 and 2024. This follows Hanim’s recognition as Indonesia’s Top 100 Lawyers in 2018 by the same publication when she was based in Jakarta. Hanim advises on best practices in law practice leadership and management through sharing and discussing concepts, experience and knowledge. She is the incoming Vice President of the International Bar Association (IBA) Section on Public and Professional Interest (SPPI) Council, Advisory Board Member of the IBA Law Firm Management Committee and member of the IBA Artificial Intelligence Working Group and Professional Wellbeing Commission. Hanim is also Senior Fellow at the CIMB Asean Research Institute (CARI) and was selected by the Singapore Academy of Law as an expert think-tank for a white paper on skills needed by legal professionals in the future. In 2019, Hanim co-founded the ASEAN Legal Tech Initiative, bringing together legal and technology experts in South-East Asia. As a leader, Hanim champions diversity and inclusion, mental health, well-being, and safety in the legal profession. She is a Board Member of the Workplace Pride Netherlands foundation.