The American Lawyer - Sample Issue

WANG JUNFENG KING & WOOD MALLESONS Beijing

Chinese Export

ALLEN HOLMES Jones Day W. JAMES MACINTOSH Morgan Lewis CLINTON STEVENSON Latham & Watkins

With an Aussie merger, Wang built China’s first international law firm.

A MAJOR INTERNATIONAL merger involving a Chinese law firm wasn’t supposed to happen so soon. The legal, financial, political, cultural, and logistical hurdles were just too great. Yet last year saw the Sino-Australian merger that produced King & Wood Mallesons. For King & Wood cofounder Wang Junfeng, now chairman of the combined firm, it was the logical next step in his long-held ambition to create the first international Chinese law firm.

Almost from its 1993 founding, Wang mod-
eled King & Wood after the U.S. and U.K.
firms he admires. Even the firm’s Western-
sounding name was designed to appeal to mul-
tinationals whose investments into China until
recently generated the bulk of legal work in
the country. To push King & Wood’s internal
culture toward international standards, Wang
hired foreign lawyers, such as Handel Lee, who
joined the firm from Vinson & Elkins; Mark
Schaub from the former Taylor Wessing; Ru-
pert Li from Clifford Chance; and Meg Utter-
back from Pillsbury Winthrop.

JONES DAY’S HOLMES (Cleveland), Morgan, Lewis & Bockius’s MacIntosh ( Philadelphia), and Latham & Watkins’s Stevenson (Los Angeles) were among the first regional law firm leaders to recognize that their biggest local clients were going national. To retain them, their firms had better become national, too. In the late sixties and early seventies, this pioneering trio pushed their partners to open offices in big urban cities across the country. “We had been a national firm as a result of the good fortune of being in a region with large American companies,” says Jones Day partner Joe Sims. Holmes (pictured) “saw how the world was going to change.”

GROWING UP in Spanish-speaking New Mexico in the early 20th century, Russell Baker decided he wanted to have an international career. As the cofounder of Baker & McKenzie, in 1949, he got it. The Chicago firm opened its first overseas office in Venezuela in 1956, and has mushroomed into more than 72 offices in 45 countries with 4,000 lawyers. At a time when Wall Street firms dominated the legal landscape, Baker took a different approach. He visualized how a modern global law firm could scale up: Using locally recruited talent from around the globe, Baker would provide one-stop shopping for some of the world’s growing multinationals. In time, much of The Am Law 100 would follow.

RUSSELL BAKER

Baker & McKenzie Chicago

WHEN REGINA PISA was elected the first woman chair of an Am Law 100 firm in 1998, her colleagues at Goodwin Procter were surprised at how much attention her gender garnered. “I have partners who did something revolutionary without even understanding how revolutionary it was,” Pisa says. A string of female chairs, including Mary Cranston at Pillsbury Madison & Sutro, Christine Lagarde at Baker & McKenzie, and Candace Beinecke at Hughes Hubbard & Reed followed Pisa soon after.