Singapore’s status as one of Asia’s two major legal hubs has received a further boost in the past few weeks, with Mayer Brown JSM opening its local office on Oct. 17, and Japanese firm Mori Hamada Matsumoto announcing plans to follow suit fairly soon.
Mayer Brown JSM’s Singapore office, located on Battery Road, currently focuses on four primary areas of legal practice: asset finance, project finance, energy and international arbitration. Kevin Owen is the office’s partner-in-charge, and he is being joined by Alastair MacAulay, a banking and finance partner in the firm’s Hong Kong office, who plans to spending a significant percentage of his time in Singapore. “We have been very pleased by the enthusiastic response we have received from clients here and around the world since we announced in June our plans to open a Singapore office,” said Owen.
Meanwhile, Mori Hamada, which opened an office in Beijing in 1998 and an office in Shanghai in 2005, is now looking to add an office in Singapore in early 2012. The office is expected to meet the demand for legal support from Japanese lawyers in Southeast and South Asia, which has risen over the last few years as a result of steady expansion in those regions by Japanese companies, coupled with increasing interest from Asian companies seeking business opportunities in Japan.
The Japanese firm’s Singapore office will be primarily staffed by Takeshi Mukawa and Takeshi Komatsu, two partners with experience between them in the finance, general corporate and mergers & acquisitions practice areas. ALB
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