Daniel Wonzo Lee has over 38 years experience of helping clients with a wide range of complex cross-border mergers and acquisitions, international joint ventures, foreign direct investments and international arbitration.
Daniel began his legal career as a litigator in Los Angeles specializing in civil litigation. Later, after many years of court room experience, he transitioned to a transaction practice at a major law firm. Voted as one of the Top 100 lawyers in Korea by the Asia Business Law Journal in 2018, 2021, 2022 and 2023, he is licensed as a foreign legal consultant in Korea and is widely known in the Korean corporate legal community as a lawyer who can advise on transactions based on his litigation experience.
Daniel has significant IT, FCPA, compliance and forensics experience stemming from his eight years as the General Counsel/Vice President of IBM Korea. His noteworthy legal record includes his role as the lead counsel for Korea's largest automobile manufacturer and many of its suppliers, helping to establish automobile assembly plants in the US and Brazil, among many other greenfield projects in foreign jurisdictions. Also, Daniel was a key member of the US arbitration team that brought a major victory for a leading Korean E&C company in an AAA arbitration in the US. In 2020, he secured 40m doses of Moderna COVID-19 vaccine for Korean government utilizing DLA Piper's US connection and led the contract negotiation with Moderna successfully.
Before joining DLA Piper in 2008 as Head of the Korea Practice in Tokyo, Daniel worked for major law firms in Los Angeles, Honolulu and Seoul.
Daniel is the founder of the In-house Counsel Forum (IHCF) in Korea, which now has over 2,400 in-house counsel members, and served as its first President from 1998 to 2002. He is also the founder of the Foreign Law Firm Association in Korea and served as its first President from 2014 to 2016. He also held two exhibitions of his photographs and sketches in Seoul and Tokyo in 2024.
