Terence Tung, Asia senior partner at Mayer Brown, talks to ALB about how the region has become a key component of the firm’s global strategy, how the operations here have integrated with the broader firm, and what opportunities lie ahead in Asia.
Before the combination between Mayer Brown and Johnson Stokes & Master in 2008, the legacy JSM had been the pre-eminent Hong Kong law firm for many years but our footprint was limited to just Asia. Thanks to the great efforts of our partners, everyone can see the combination remains to this day one of the most successful integration of large law firms ever. The combination has resulted in several significant changes. Our global footprint has expanded, our core products have become aligned across our offices and we have expanded our client base so that we are now acting for our core clients in all four corners of the globe.
Today, we pride ourselves on being a distinctively global law firm, uniquely positioned to advise the world’s leading companies and financial institutions with approximately 200 lawyers in each of the world’s three largest financial centres – Hong Kong, London and New York – the backbone of the global economy.
When I took the leadership role at Mayer Brown three years ago, I advocated for integration of our people, our practices and our systems with other offices.
Today, we see our lawyers in Asia cross-selling our products in offices in multiple jurisdictions and helping each other to win work from global clients. We also see lawyers from different practices and offices collaborating on complicated projects to add value for our clients. Our lawyers operate within a truly global network. This behavioural change is really encouraging. We see the results of this change in the number of clients served in the three regions in which we operate: Asia, Europe and the Americas. In 2018, we served two-thirds of our top 100 clients in all three regions and more than 80 percent of those clients in two regions.
In my view, this attests to the success of our partners to collaborate with their colleagues here and around the world. Another significant change is the globalisation of our internal systems, which allows us to collaborate more effectively and enhance client service. We now have globalised our functional capabilities in business development, marketing and communications, finance and accounts, information technology, knowledge management, legal risk and compliance and legal project management.
The result of this initiative is improved efficiency and consistency.
Our strategy in Asia is simple: Continue to grow our core capabilities in response to client demand and enhance collaboration with our colleagues in other offices to best serve the interest of our clients. Our ability, both collectively and individually, to adapt to the changes in the legal environment in Asia and to overcome challenges from our competitors has kept us as a leading player in both mature markets as well as frontier markets like Myanmar and Mongolia.
We are strong in local practices and can offer global solutions through collective efforts. We have aligned our products globally by leveraging our capabilities to the benefit of our global platform and reinforced our transformation to a distinctively global law firm. With the aid of our global platform, we see more and more opportunities that involve the collaboration of teams from different offices.
Finally, China has become a key driver for revenue for our Asia practice. With the implementation of the Belt and Road and Greater Bay initiatives by the Chinese government, we see an abundance of great opportunities spread across huge geography where we can showcase our global products including China-related ones.
To contact the editorial team, please email ALBEditor@thomsonreuters.com.
