Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has appointed James Yuan, former executive legal director at industry peer Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD), as head of global compliance investigations for the Asia-Pacific region.
Yuan has 18 years of experience and is admitted to practise in New York. He specialises in corporate compliance, white-collar crime investigations and regulatory enforcement.
Before joining AstraZeneca, Yuan spent nearly seven years at MSD in Shanghai, where he progressed from legal director to executive director and managing counsel in global investigations with the company’s office of general counsel.
Prior to his in-house transition, Yuan practised for a decade at Covington & Burling and Dorsey at the New York and Shanghai offices.
Yuan has extensive experience in anti-bribery and anti-corruption matters, with expertise in internal investigations, regulatory and litigation matters. He has served as an associate managing editor of Stanford Law School’s China Guiding Cases Project for six years. From 2023 to 2025, China Business Law Journal recognised him consecutively in its In-house Counsel Awards.
