5 ASIAN LEGAL BUSINESS – SEPTEMBER 2023 WWW.LEGALBUSINESSONLINE.COM BRI EFS especially as the latter continues to be a growing industry service and dispute amounts grow larger. ALFRED IP, founding partner, Hugill & Ip In my experience, clients always expect a high level of certainty for legal services, from the advice that they seek to the price that they pay for the advice. In most of the non-contentious matters, such as drafting and advising on a legal document, experienced lawyers should be able to provide a fee quote and adhere to the same. If there are any unforeseen circumstances leading to an escalation of time spent and change of quotation, they should inform the clients immediately. Clients hate surprises as much as lawyers! This is particularly the case when we are talking about legal services which are highly commoditised, such as will writing (although we have litigated a lot of those wills), when the decision-making process is highly driven by price. To stay competitive, we need to educate our potential clients that we are providing an extra level of services to do a proper job for them, and therefore, our fees may not be the lowest in the market. For some of our legal services that we cannot provide a fixed fee quote, e.g., in contentious legal proceedings, we may consider flexible payment arrangement, taking into account clients’ financial means and resources. In Hong Kong, we cannot enter contingency fee arrangement with our clients, but we can certainly consider payment arrangement such as monthly instalments. We also consider it part of our job to provide a high level of transparency in our billing process and a regular billing cycle for our clients to understand and settle their bills. DEALS $5.5 BLN Arm Holdings’ planned NASDAQ IPO Deal Type: IPO Firms: Sullivan & Cromwell; Morrison & Foerster; Davis Polk & Wardwell Jurisdictions: U.S., UK, Japan $1 BLN Qatar Investment Authority’s acquisition of stake in Reliance Retail Ventures Deal Type: M&A Firms: Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas; AZB & Partners; Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton Jurisdiction: India, Qatar $936 MLN MUFG’s acquisition of stake in U.S. Bancorp Deal Type: M&A Firm: Sullivan & Cromwell Jurisdictions: U.S., Japan $898 MLN PAG Asia’s acquisition of Australian Venue Co. Holdings from KKR Deal Type: M&A Firms: Ashurst; Allens Jurisdictions: Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand $567 MLN Growtheum Capital Partners’ debut fund closing Deal Type: Funds Firm: Morrison Foerster Jurisdiction: Singapore $500 MLN LNG Japan’s acquisition of stake in Scarborough LNG project from Woodside Energy Group Deal Type: Projects Firms: Baker Botts; Ashurst Jurisdiction: Australia $467 MLN MUFG Bank’s acquisition of PT Mandala Multifinance Deal Type: M&A Firms: Nishimura & Asahi; Walalangi & Partners Jurisdictions: Indonesia, Japan $150 MLN VNG’s planned IPO on NASDAQ Deal Type: IPO Firms: Allen & Overy; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; VILAF Jurisdictions: Vietnam, U.S.
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