Michael O. Braun is a partner in Morrison & Foerster’s New York office. He is a transactional attorney whose practice focuses on U.S.-based transactional and advisory work, mostly on behalf of Asian and European companies, including many Japanese companies.

Mr. Braun has over 25 years of experience representing some of Japan’s largest companies in their U.S. transactions – mergers & acquisitions, joint ventures, and corporate investments with particular emphasis on life science companies. In the last several years, he led the Morrison & Foerster teams that assisted Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical and Fujisawa Pharmaceutical in concluding the U.S. transactions related to the merger which created Astellas Pharma Inc. and the merger between Sankyo Pharmaceutical and Daiichi Pharmaceutical that created Daiichi Sankyo Pharmaceutical, forming the second and third largest pharmaceutical companies in Japan, respectively. He also works with other foreign-based and U.S. companies interested in securing strategic investments and alliances around the world. Mr. Braun’s clients include global aerospace, retail, real estate, printing, food and beverages, and pharmaceutical/biotechnology businesses.

Other examples of transactions Mr. Braun worked on include representing Japan’s largest brewery in forming a joint venture with America’s largest brewery to sell and market Japanese beer in the U.S., assisting a Japanese real estate developer in acquiring a 5-Star luxury hotels in California and Europe, assisting a Japanese aerospace company in numerous international strategic alliances around the world, assisting a large Japanese technology company in acquiring the business assets comprising a stand alone business in North America from a public Canadian technology company and assisting the world’s largest printing company in acquiring a leading integrator of digital photographic printing equipment. Mr. Braun has also advised Japanese companies on the acquisition of public U.S. companies.

In the life sciences practice area, in addition to the Yamanouchi/Fujisawa and the Sankyo/Daiichi transactions, in the last three years Mr. Braun represented Astellas in a $815 million collaboration with Fibrogen, which at that time was the largest collaborative transaction with a biotechnology company, in the acquisition of certain assets from Biogen Idec, in the acquisition of research facilities from Dynogen, as well as numerous other collaborations and investments in biotechnology companies. In the last three years, Mr. Braun also assisted several Japanese companies help make numerous venture capital and private investments in emerging companies, focusing on drug delivery, medical devices and medical diagnostic products as well as new pharmaceutical products.

Prior to joining Morrison & Foerster, Mr. Braun was a partner at Bingham McCutchen and, prior to that, he was a senior partner at Richards & O’Neil in New York (which merged with Bingham McCutchen’s predecessor firm in 2001). Mr. Braun currently heads the New York office’s Corporate Finance Group and also is co-chair of the firm’s New York Japan Practice Group. He is a contributing author to a chapter in “Doing business in the United States: New York,” a handbook in the Practical Law Company’s “PLC Cross-border” 2007 series.

Mr. Braun was born in Tokyo, Japan, and came to the U.S. in 1963 to attend preparatory school. He received his B.A. from Columbia in 1970 and his J.D. from Columbia School of Law in 1973, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone scholar.