UK firm SJ Berwin will become the fourth member of the King & Wood Mallesons network following a successful partner vote yesterday. Effective November 1, SJ Berwin will become a member of the KWM Swiss Verein, which at present consists of King & Wood Mallesons Hong Kong, King & Wood Mallesons Australia and King & Wood Mallesons China.  After a transitional period, SJ Berwin will operate under the KWM brand.

The resulting network will boast 553 partners, 2,233 lawyers and about US$1 billion in revenues, although the firms will remain financially separate.  SJ Berwin will be contributing 165 partners and 346 lawyers to this mix. The move is being billed as “the combination of [an] Asian regional powerhouse and SJ Berwin’s European and Middle East top quality capability.”

Australian dissent
At a press conference to unveil the merger last night, global managing partner Stuart Fuller was asked to comment on rumours that the Australian partnership was less enthusiastic about the move than its Asia counterparts. Fuller said that these rumours were unfounded. “There was widespread support across all of the firms for this combination. All of the firms have substantial majorities you need to achieve in order to do a transaction like this,” he said. However, he declined a request to disclose the voting results. “I understand the interest, but we don’t do that. We’re a private law firm; private law firms don’t necessarily give out that information. The key thing is that there was widespread support across all of the firms.”  The Australian and HK partners voted in person yesterday, while the Chinese partnership voted electronically yesterday and SJ Berwin voted electronically over the past five days. “Each of those [arrangements] simply reflect the governance requirements of each of the different firms,” said Fuller. 

No redundancies
Fuller said that he did not foresee any redundancies as a result of the merger. “We have very small overlaps between the two firms; we have integration plans, we’ll have people from those offices joining the firm in London, in Hong Kong and Shanghai,” he said.  The London office of KWM will be folded into the SJ Berwin office, while the opposite will occur in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

He added that the firm was interested in pursuing a U.S. presence. “Right from the outset we always said our vision and our aspiration was to become a leading global law firm based in Asia,” he said. “This is an important step around English law capability and the European platform. U.S. capability would have to be part of that to be a global  firm but what we don’t have  is a giant chart that says ‘this firm by this time will have this capability.’ What we do is look at where our clients are saying business is and we look then at where we have opportunities in those markets with firms that really share the vision and the strategy of what we’re looking to achieve.”

Singapore will also be a market of interest.  “Singapore and South Asia remain  a market of very high interest to KWM,” Fuller said.