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Each year, ALB recognises leading women lawyers in Asia, who continually deliver impressive results in their respective practice areas and jurisdictions, earning accolades from colleagues and breaking ground in the process.

Can you tell us about your notable work in the past year or so?

Over the last couple of years, my work included advising on complex transactions across Southeast and South Asia, Japan, China and Latin America totalling over US$60 billion in deal value. The pandemic saw even stronger demand in sectors that we already had a market-leading position in, such as industrial and logistics assets, data centres and e-commerce and technology platforms.

I enjoy the dynamism of designing a transaction that achieves each party’s key objectives at each stage in the cycle of the investment while meeting regulatory and tax needs, as well as collaborating with my partners in other practices to ﬁnd solutions for clients.

My team and I advised private equity manager Everstone Capital Asia Pte. Ltd. in the formation of an India-focused data centre platform with joint venture partner and global data centre operator, the Yondr Group. We also advised long-time client GLP Pte. Ltd. on the establishment of the largest Japan-focused private real estate fund to date, GLP Japan Development Partners IV. It is the fourth vintage of our client’s ﬂagship logistics development fund series in Japan and is expected to reach over JPY 1 trillion (~$9.1 billion) of assets under management when fully deployed.

It’s been three years since you were named managing partner of MoFo’s Singapore office. How has the experience been so far?

Being managing partner of our Singapore ofﬁce has been very rewarding, despite a somewhat challenging ﬁrst year which included leading the ofﬁce through a signiﬁcant ofﬁce expansion project and the onset of the COVID pandemic, both at the same time.

Deciding on a course of action in completely novel circumstances and a rapidly changing business environment, particularly when the pandemic was conﬁned to Asia and had not yet started to impact our ofﬁces and clients outside of Asia, required a consultative approach with stakeholders, thoughtful consideration of potential consequences, and the courage to make decisions with the best-available information while being far from certain about the outcome. I found it helpful to evaluate each key decision through the lens of whether it would be in the interests of our clients, our ﬁrm, or the community in which we operate.

It was also a time when demand from clients for our legal services was at an all-time high, our teams were consistently at full capacity, and we were doing our best to serve client needs while coping with the mental and physical toll of the pandemic. I’m proud of how everyone in the ofﬁce truly gave of their best and what we achieved through it all – our Singapore ofﬁce grew significantly through the pandemic and has been recognised with signiﬁcant accolades, including being named Deal Firm of the Year in the ALB SEA Law Awards 2020 and Law Firm of the Year, Singapore for both 2020 and 2021 by The Legal 500. Later this year, it will be 10 years since MoFo opened its Singapore ofﬁce. We’ve achieved a lot in the last 10 years and I am looking forward to leading the ofﬁce into its second decade.

A Q&A with Shirin Tang of Morrison & Foerster, one of ALB Asia’s Top 15 Female Lawyers

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