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  • July 23, 2010 |

    Letter from Asia: Should US firms build local practices in Hong Kong?

    The Agricultural Bank of China's initial public offering (IPO), expected to become the world's largest, debuted this week, landing squarely in the middle of a debate over whether leading Wall Street law firms should build local practice capability in Hong Kong. The IPO on the Hong Kong and Shanghai exchanges would seem an obvious rallying cry for those arguing that top US capital markets firms will miss out on deals without their own Hong Kong lawyers - except that the lead lawyers on the AgBank deal are from New York's Davis Polk & Wardwell, which only practises US law.

    1 minute read

  • July 5, 2010 |

    White House releases salary details of senior legal staff

    The Obama administration has released the annual list of lawyers working in the White House, after announcing an extension to last year's pay freeze for senior officials, reports The National Law Journal. White House Counsel Robert Bauer is the top-earner among the list of legal staff, taking home $172,200 (£114,100), the same salary that his predecessor, Gregory Craig, was earning this time last year.

    1 minute read

  • June 22, 2010 |

    Herbert Smith wins role on landmark Chinese bank IPO

    Herbert Smith has won a role on what is set to be the world's largest-ever initial public offering (IPO) as the Agricultural Bank of China (AgBank) gears up to go public. The UK top 10 law firm is advising the underwriting banks on the landmark listing, which was initially valued at as much as $30bn (£20.2bn), although market estimates have since been tempered by a drop in China's stock market, with a figure of $23bn (£15.5bn) now thought to be more likely.

    1 minute read

  • June 18, 2010 |

    Herbert Smith wins role on record IPO of Chinese banking giant

    Herbert Smith has won a role on what is set to be the world's largest-ever initial public offering (IPO) as the Agricultural Bank of China (AgBank) goes public. The UK top 10 firm is advising the underwriting banks on the landmark listing, which was initially valued at as much as $30bn (£20.2bn), although market estimates have since been tempered by a drop in China's stock market, with a figure of $23bn (£15.5bn) now thought to be more likely.

    1 minute read

  • June 9, 2010 |

    Editor's comment: Consolidate, later

    Considering how much they like to talk about globalisation, lawyers have some contradictory ideas regarding the concept. Take this week's Big Question poll on transatlantic mergers, which finds a clear - if not overwhelming - consensus that there is a need for consolidation in the legal industry. There is also a feeling that the newly-confirmed merger between Denton Wilde Sapte and Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal will create a stronger proposition for large clients. In fact, three out of four respondents believe the deal would, to some extent, create a stronger platform for clients compared to the legacy practices in isolation.

    1 minute read

  • May 27, 2010 |

    China: The great search forward

    Victor Liang plows his metallic beige BMW sedan through Beijing's traffic on a crisp February morning as he describes how he came to be the first general counsel at Baidu, China's leading internet search engine. It was five years ago, and he was wrapping up an LLM at the University of New South Wales in Australia after having studied law at Peking University a decade before. "I wanted to do some work to combine Chinese local issues and some overseas issues," recalls Liang, who toiled for a few years as a Beijing bureaucrat before switching careers.

    1 minute read

  • May 26, 2010 |

    China: Years of the dragon

    On Tuesday 4 May at 7:30am a car arrived to pick up former Lovells Beijing managing partner Robert Lewis from his house in the Shunyi district of the Chinese capital, a part of town popular with expats. As it weaved its way off the estate and onto the traffic-choked main road leading to the city centre, Lewis thought about what lay ahead for him at AllBright Law Offices, the Chinese law firm where he was about to start his first day's work. His decision to join the firm, where his brief is to overhaul AllBright's structure and expand its Beijing office to match its market-leading offering in Shanghai, is one Lewis has been edging towards for years now, and he maintains it is unrelated to Lovells' recently concluded merger with US firm Hogan & Hartson.

    1 minute read

  • May 19, 2010 |

    Citigroup names 'golden nine' line-up of UK firms in two-tier EMEA panel

    Citigroup has overhauled its external legal arrangements, creating two new panels of preferred law firms. The banking giant has unveiled new panels of advisers in the Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) region and the US, formalising its previous roster of law firms.

    1 minute read

  • April 27, 2010 |

    Elite trio take top roles on US Treasury's Citigroup share sale

    Simpson Thacher & Bartlett is advising the US Treasury on its plan to unload 7.7 billion government-owned Citigroup shares in a series of sales rather than all at once, reports The Am Law Daily. The US Government has retained Morgan Stanley to prepare the sale and place the initial batch of 1.5 billion Citi shares on the market, with Davis Polk & Wardwell and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton sharing the job of advising Morgan Stanley.

    1 minute read

  • April 14, 2010 |

    US Briefing: Road trip

    At around 3pm on 6 October 2009, roughly 100 lawyers and executives filed into a conference room in Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom's Manhattan office. It had taken three years, 11 months and 29 days to get to this moment: Delphi was emerging from the depths of bankruptcy and passing into the hands of its former parent, General Motors Company (GM), as well as two lenders. There was a palpable sense of exhaustion in the room; the close had been convened seven hours earlier. The Veuve Clicquot, selected by Delphi lead lawyer John 'Jack' Butler Jr but poured prematurely, was flat.

    1 minute read