Mr. Hough is the head of the Tokyo office Litigation Department. Mr. Hough’s practice focuses on complex commercial litigation and arbitration, with an emphasis on intellectual property disputes. His matters have included breach-of-contract claims, joint venture dissolutions, trade secret misappropriation claims and distribution agreement disputes, among other subjects. Mr. Hough has also conducted internal investigations and represented witnesses and subjects of government investigations. Mr. Hough is licensed as a Gaikokuho Jimu Bengoshi and is a member of the Daini Tokyo Bar Association.
Mr. Hough’s patent litigation experience spans a variety of technical fields, including biotechnology, semiconductors, medical devices and business methods. His copyright experience includes matters involving software, jewelry and toy designs, and rights to musical compositions. In a high-profile case, he represented the author and publisher of the best-selling book Memoirs of a Geisha.
Mr. Hough was selected as an “IP Star” for the 2014 edition of the MIP Handbook for Japan in the areas of Patent: Protection & Litigation, Trade Mark: Enforcement & Litigation and Copyright: Contentious. He is also recommended in the 2014 edition of The Legal 500 Asia Pacific in the areas of Intellectual Property and Dispute Resolution. Additionally, Benchmark: Asia Pacific selected Mr. Hough as a leading litigation star in Japan in the 2014 guide.
Mr. Hough is a member of the American Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association (for which he served as vice chair of the Intellectual Property Committee of the Commercial & Federal Litigation Section), and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (for which he served as Secretary of the Arbitration Committee).
Mr. Hough obtained his law degree (J.D. 1986) cum laude from New York University School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Snow scholar, a member of the Order of the Coif, and a recipient of the John Norton Pomeroy and the Maurice Goodman Memorial Prizes. Mr. Hough was the head of Litigation Department in the New York office from 2007–2011.
