Allen & Overy law firm news

A summary of deals information received by ALB this week.

International law firm Simmons & Simmons has recruited corporate lawyer Eric Lin to its planned Beijing team.

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer has hired Linklaters’ counsel Howard Lam to join the firm as partner.

Revealing the winners at the 2011 ALB-Macquarie Bank Law Awards: which firms collected the honours this year?

Hong Kong corporate lawyer Charles Ching was among the latest to be promoted to ‘of counsel’ at Freshfields. His was also one of three recent ‘of counsel’ promotions in the corporate practice of Magic Circle firms.

Orrick has hired Latham & Watkins' partner William Chun Fai Woo to join its Hong Kong capital markets practice.

Allen & Overy has frozen salary bands for associates, citing "flat" business conditions in the UK.

Barrick swoops on Equinox, China zeroes in on Australia

Despite the current social and political commotion in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region, Baker & McKenzie has launch an office in Doha, Qatar – the capital that registered the highest GDP growth globally in 2010.

Ashurst has promoted three partners in the Middle East with effect from 1 May 2011. This is part of a larger round of global partnership promotions, numbering 12; up one from 11 last year.

DLA Piper has promoted seven new partners in Asia – two in China, three in Hong Kong and one each in Singapore and Tokyo. The promotions will take effect from 1 May 2011. The promotions in Asia are part of a round that sees 53 new partners joining its ranks.

Following an exhaustive research process involving a record number of submissions from law firms and in-house legal departments this year, ALB is proud to announce the finalists for the ALB SE Asia Law Awards 2011, the most important event on SE Asia's legal calendar.

M&A specialist partner Piyasena Perera has left Magic Circle firm Allen & Overy to join Japanese Big Four, Anderson Mori & Tomotsune, as a special foreign counsel.

Australian and international law firms are continuing to closely monitor the nuclear power station situation in Japan after relocating staff to other offices.

Clifford Chance, Allen & Overy, Freshfields, Ashurst, Herbert Smith and Norton Rose all sprang into action yesterday amid concern for the safety of their Tokyo-based employees following last week’s earthquake, tsunami and the recently heightened fears of spreading nuclear contamination.

The dynamic Perth market has proved too hard to ignore for insurance specialist Moray & Agnew, which has opened a new office there to be headed by Phil Keays.

A milestone LNG project between the world’s largest LNG buyer, Kogas; Japan’s largest trading house, Mitsubishi Corporation; and Indonesia’s largest private sector energy company, Medco Energi Internasional, marks the first-ever joint venture partnership between Korea, Japan and Indonesia on an LNG project. Hogan Lovells; Widyawan & Partners; Allen & Overy, Herbert Smith and its Indonesian ally, Hiswara, Bujamin & Tanjung (HBT), have all played roles on the deal which itself was six years the making.

The presidents of the South Australian and West Australian law societies have hit back at claims by the Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland that the arrival of Clifford Chance in Perth increases the need for the WA legal profession to join the proposed national regulatory system for the legal profession.

Is this the start of a brave new era in the Australian legal services market, or just a rebranding of two existing players?

The introduction of a new Foreign Practitioner Certificate (FPC), passed through a bill amendment in parliament last month, ushers in the next phase of legal market liberalisation.