Hwa-Jin Kim, an L. Bates Lea Global Professor of Law at the University of Michigan since 2011, also teaches at Seoul National University School of Law. He is the lead independent director of Hyundai Mobis, the largest shareholder of Hyundai Motor Group, and chair of the corporate governance committee of the National Pension Service of Korea, the world’s third-largest public pension fund.

Kim has taught at NYU Law in Shanghai, Tel Aviv University, and Stanford Law School. He is published in the Journal of Corporation Law, Oxford University Comparative Law Forum, Columbia Business Law Review, Berkeley Journal of International Law, and elsewhere.

Before joining academia in 2006, Kim practiced corporate and securities law in Korea and Switzerland, where he advised and worked for or with global investment banking houses in their international mergers and acquisitions, private equity, and capital market transactions.

Kim has advised the Office of the President of the Republic of Korea; the Korea Financial Supervisory Service; and the Ministry of Justice, Republic of Korea. He was the public interest director of the Korea Financial Investment Association and the independent director and chair of the audit committee of HD Hyundai, the world's largest shipbuilder. He also is an independent director of Macquarie Korea Infrastructure Fund, the largest mutual fund in Korea.

Kim is the longest-serving senior opinion writer for Money Today media group, which owns Korea’s largest news agencies and online business and financial news outlets.

He won the Book Prize from the Korean National Academy of Sciences in 2005, 2010, and 2015. His recent books in Korean include Theoretical Foundations of Securities Regulation, 2nd ed. (2016), Theories in International Law (2017), Investment Banking, 7th ed. (2019), and Corporate Governance, 9th ed. (2023).