An American law office with 650+ lawyers will be stealthy closing its three China offices at the end of May.
Surrendering ignominiously the China market, the world’s second largest economy, the place that has been transformative, the site of the greatest economic transformation in the history of the world as simply too competitive.
What I have found is bizarre is American law firms entered China and hired so-called China-hands whose only skill was promoting themselves as China hands-not finding, minding, and grinding things out on behalf of clients. Law firms are big business. One of my classmates in the MD of a firm that has $3B USD+ in revenues in the US. He confessed less that 0.1 percent of those revenues are derived from China-related work. The China office is a vanity project-hiring attractive but clueless China-born Ivy-league law graduates who “could not find a revenue stream if their lives depended upon it”. And so it goes, American firms continue to shutter and give way in China even in light of the new Asian based Marshal Plan with Chinese characteristics the One Belt One Road (
一带一路
) the ambitious China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the implementation of blockchain in China financial services which reported the People
’
s Daily will save reportedly the China financial services industry some $20B USD in costs each year.
So what is it? American lawyers and Big Law retreats-what does that mean-not much I guess as this is the way Big Law ends, not with a bang but a whimper- got it.