WON JUN LEE, ESQ.

Won Jun "Sam" Lee, Esq. A born-again Christian whose worldview is grounded in Scripture, Won Jun Lee approaches his practice with strong ethical principles and a client-first mindset, grateful for the wisdom that the Lord Jesus Christ provides him each day. Over a career spanning U.S. and Korean government agencies, judicial bodies, and major corporations since 2011, he has led projects with an aggregate value in the trillions of Korean won (ivalent to several billion U.S. dollars). Beginning his career at the Kansas Department of Revenue, he drafted determinations, opinion letters, and private rulings, establishing precedents with multi-billion-dollar effects on Kansas state taxpayerse.g., cross-border taxes on online commerce activities)—several of which continue to govern state tax policy today, more than a decade later (e.g., tax incentives for satellite-based precision agriculture technology). As a foreign-trained law student, he was also entrusted with contributing to U.S. state legislative drafting on tax policy, a role rarely extended to non-U.S.-citizen attorneys. In Korea, he served as task force secretariat for revisions to the Korean Military Criminal Act (within the High Court for Armed Forces) the ICRC Commentary on the Geneva Conventions (within the Korea Headquarters Office of the Judge Advocate General), and to the development of sentencing standards for Korean military courts, as well as the application of international law (IHL) to emerging technologies, including cyber measures and weapons systems. While completing Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, he partnered with a Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) instructor to launch an international real estate transactions course in Korea. In 2026, he was selected as a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley Law. Over the past five years, his practice has focused global cross-border work, including international contracts, IPOs, M&A, joint ventures, compliance, and arbitration/ADR. He has led legal work on projects with an aggregate value exceeding USD 10 billion across Korea, the United States, Canada, Indonesia Vietnam, and Europe. Representative matters include SK Hynix (the world’s leading HBM supplier for AI accelerators, including NVIDIA’s H100/H200 and forthcoming Rubin platforms; surpassed Samsung in 2025 annual operating profit); SK Innovation E&S (the energy arm of SK Group, one of Korea’s largest conglomerates and a Fortune Global 500 enterprise) on hydrogen project; SKC on semiconductor glass-substrate manufacturing; foreign battery production facilities for Ford and SK On; EcoPro BM (the world’s leading high-nickel cathode with a USD 34 billion long-term contract with Samsung SDI) on a Canadian scope-of-work engagement; a North American airport expansion co-invested with Blackstone (the world’s largest alternative asset manager, with AUM exceeding USD 1 trillion); real estate development for Costco; and engagements for core revenue-generating affiliates of leading Korean conglomerates, each commanding a lion’s share of their global markets. During this period, he received an unsolicited invitation from SK Holdings—the holding company of SK Group—to be registered on its internal “Top 1% Talent” roster, an elite talent pool comprising senior professionals identified by the group as critical to its strategic operations. He also brings cross-border IPO experience, including legal due diligence for a Singapore-headquartered group’s KOSPI/KOSDAQ listing with a peak market capitalization of approximately USD 3 billion. His substantive industry experience spans semiconductors and electronics, pharmaceuticals (including RNA technologies), medical devices (including COVID-19 test kits), plant and EPC construction, real estate, hydrogen energy, wind and solar power, ESG, and virtual power generation.

 

He served as a clerk to a KCAB international arbitrator in a dispute between a Korean company and a Belarusian counterparty. He also contributed, among others, an analysis on a VIAC share purchase agreement dispute, addressing core issues of damages, force majeure, statute of limitations, timely performance, and order of precedence—analysis that helped deliver meaningful cost reduction and recovery for the client.

 

Beyond these arbitrations, he has numerous closing-stage disputes between Korean conglomerates and top-tier global counterparties involving liquidated damages, suspension,, start-up, performance testing, warranties, and construction insurance. In compliance, he in the implementation phase of Korea’s comprehensively revised Personal Information Protection Act (Korea’s data-privacy statute, analogous to the EU’s GDPR), and has built compliance frameworks for global anti-bribery, anti-corruption, and human rights due diligence. As a university lecturer, he has focused on comparative law and global soft-law research.

 

His course at Konkuk University’s Graduate School of Public Administration represented Korea’s first formal academic application of the UN Sustainable Development Goals to municipal administration. He developed the “Global U.S. Tariff Response Program,” now delivered through Korea’s principal central-government economic-policy agencies—including KOTRA, MOTIE, MSS, KCS, and KIPO—as well as through private-sector channels including Thomson Reuters. He is also one of the leading experts on CISG (Convention on International Sale of Goods). At Joowon LLC, he leads strategic collaboration with Joowon Lawyers and experts and leading U.S. law firms and delivers cross-border execution for global projects.