David WATERS

Senior Foreign Attorney, Kim & Chang

[email protected]

David Waters is a senior foreign attorney at Kim & Chang. His practice focuses on corporate compliance & investigations, workplace discrimination & sexual harassment, and competition law. He has extensive experience with the global operations of multinational companies and managing reputational, legal, regulatory and compliance matters for those companies.

David has been working in Korea for over 20 years, both as an in-house and law firm attorney. He started his legal career in 1997 in Washington, DC as an international trade lawyer at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, before moving to Korea in 2000 to join Kim & Chang. From 2004 to 2015, David worked as in-house general counsel at IBM Korea and GM Korea. He returned to Kim & Chang as a senior foreign attorney in 2016.

David is past president of the In-House Counsel Forum, an organization of over 1,000 in-house lawyers in Korea. He is current co-chair of the Compliance & Ethics Committee of AMCHAM Korea. In addition, in 2012 the Korea Bar Association appointed David as a member of the Foreign Legal Consultant Disciplinary Action Committee, an entity established under the Foreign Legal Consultants Act. He is also past Vice President of the Seoul Club, where he served as Chair of its Membership Committee.

David is a native of California. He obtained his B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has law degrees from Columbia University (J.D.) and Seoul National University (LL.B.). He is fluent in written and spoken Korean.