David earned his Bachelor of Arts in East Asian Studies from Brown University and graduated with honors from the University of Washington School of Law, where he concentrated in Asian Law and International & Comparative Law. During law school, he served as President of the International Law Society and as Chief Managing Editor of the Washington International Law Journal, in which he also published legal scholarship.

David has business-level fluency in Japanese and is conversational in Korean. He attended Keio University Law School in Tokyo, taking classes in their LL.M. program where he studied cross-border acquisitions, corporate governance, real estate investment, and intellectual property licensing. Prior to joining the firm, he worked as a professional Japanese-to-English translator, translating legal, business, and technical materials for global companies such as Rakuten, Glico, and Facebook.