Ken D. Kumayama

Kumayama, the head of Skadden’s intellectual property and technology practice in Palo Alto, focuses on large, complex cross-border deals that draw on his deep technical knowledge in computer programming, network security, FinTech and artificial intelligence. His understanding of the regulatory and technical complexities facing data-centric multinational clients allows him to address their most critical cyber and privacy issues.

Clients include Tiktok parent ByteDance Ltd.; Credit Karma, Inc.; LendingClub Corp.; Sabre Corp. and Dell Inc.

Kumayama attributes at least some of his career successes to “luck and happenstance,” but his various accomplishments and pre-law endeavors established an ideal platform for a career handling global cybersecurity, data privacy and IP matters. He is fluent in Japanese, studied theoretical chemistry, geophysics, bioinformatics and math as an undergrad; and wrote a prescient law school paper on internet privacy “before Internet privacy was even really a thing,” he said. It doesn’t hurt that he also worked as a Linux system administrator prior to law school. “That in-the-trenches experience has really helped me communicate effectively with engineering teams and other technical professionals in the work I do now,” he said.

Shortly after joining Skadden 11 years ago, Kumayama said he got a sweet deal when the firm paid part of his salary while he worked as a foreign associate at a law firm in Osaka, Japan, where he lived with his Japanese wife’s parents. He has dual U.S. and Japanese citizenship. Those broadening experiences came in handy. “I thought I’d do transactional work. Then Skadden asked if I’d be interested in transactional IP, and I said yes.”

Kumayama is one of the lead IP lawyers on the Skadden team, representing Beijing-headquartered ByteDance in cybersecurity, IP and other matters. Kumayama was there for ByteDance’s 2017 acquisition of the Chinese social media service Musical.ly, which it merged into TikTok. “I go way back. I was in China at the time and it turned out to be a very smart buy,” he said.

Kumayama also helped advise ByteDance when former President Donald J. Trump called for a TikTok ban in the U.S., which led to a proceeding before the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. regarding U.S. and Chinese governmental regulation of export controls, code and data security and cybersecurity.

He served as the lead IP and data privacy attorney on the $7.1 billion deal in which Credit Karma was acquired by Intuit Inc. in the largest venture-backed FinTech sale and one of the top five largest internet mergers and acquisitions transactions. Kumayama said an antitrust-driven carveout of Credit Karma’s free tax e-filing business was actually more complex than the acquisition. “For me, as an IP and privacy professional, the relatively small carveout was a lot more complicated than the bigger deal.”

- John Roemer