U.S.-headquartered law firm K&L Gates stands at what it terms as the “critical crossroads of the 21st century”, the firm’s Chairman and Global Managing Partner Peter J. Kalis said recently in Singapore.

Kalis, who was speaking at a lunch event organised by the American Chamber of Commerce in Singapore, said that the crossroads were at the intersection of globalisation, regulation and innovation, the three most important challenges facing clients today.

Globalisation, according to Kalis, is the movement of people, products, capital, services, ideas and commodities across national borders. “Clients need advice on this side of the border, they need advice on that side of the border, and they need advice on how to cross the border,” he said. “Law firms can’t fake that expertise; they either have it or they don’t.”

The second big challenge is “the ratchet-like interventions of governments around the world into private markets,” said Kalis, adding that this is occurring because of the expanded universe of knowledge that public decision makers have now. “Think of how much more we know now than in 2007 about the interconnectedness of the global financial markets, where countries like Cyprus and Iceland can drag the global financial sector to the brink of destruction,” he said. “When you have greater knowledge, and when you’re a public decision maker, you need to act on that.” All of these lead to greater regulatory challenges for clients, he added.

The third and final challenge is innovation, which Kalis said implied the creation and protection of intellectual property. “Ten years ago there was a statistic that 40 percent of the assets of the world’s largest corporations were housed in intellectual property, he said. “That was before the iPhone. Just imagine how the smartphone revolution will have changed everything now.”

In Asia, Kalis noted, these three challenges intersected perfectly. “As a region, its internal trade flow has accelerated dramatically, and its investment flow has accelerated dramatically,” he said. “Look at Australia’s five leading trading partners: China, Japan, Korea, India and the U.S. at No. 5. You have an extraordinary phenomenon in the Asia-Pacific region where the region is taking itself seriously on its own as an economic force, as a very organic economic phenomenon. And at the same time, it contributes to the cross-border legal requirements of the clients, and has become ever more highly interactive with the rest of the world.” He said that while the greatest source of innovation in the world remained the United States, a lot of that country’s innovations were finding their way into Asia. “In Asia, clients need intellectual property protection, and they need assistance in creating intellectual property as well,” said Kalis. “And then you look at the regulatory interventions in the PRC – the government is very active in its markets – and also in the other countries as well.”

Kalis said the law firm viewed Singapore as the fulcrum of its Asia-Pacific regional deployment. “At one level you can look on the map and see six offices north of Singapore, and four offices south of Singapore, but that’s kind of superficial. The more important point is to look at the role Singapore plays in Southeast Asia,” he said. “From the standpoint of a law firm like ours, the extent to which it can play a role in our India strategy, the extent to which it communicates with the Greater China market, the extent to which it communicates southward towards Australia, and the extent to which it communicates with leading trading partners like Japan and Korea, it has what might be called a functional centrality in the regional that makes it a really preferred investment for a global law firm.”

K&L Gates has 47 offices worldwide, of which 11 are in the Asia-Pacific region. Four of these are in Australia, with the remainder in Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo.

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