A team of 23 lawyers and 12 support staff have left Dentons in Shanghai and joined Morgan Lewis to launch the latter’s first office in the city and its sixth in Asia. At the helm of the departing team are five global corporate transactional partners – Mitch Dudek, Todd Liao, Alex Wang, Eddie Hsu and Cindy Pan. The team was Dentons’ legacy office in Shanghai prior to its combination with local giant Dacheng, which expanded the firm's headcount in the city to more than 600 lawyers.

Team spirit

‘The team is incredibly well established in China,’ commented Morgan Lewis chairwoman Jami Wintz McKeon. ‘They’re used to working together across a broad range of practices, seamlessly.’ All five of the moving partners have worked together for more than a decade and joined Dentons together from Paul Hastings in 2011. Ms McKeon believes it was Morgan Lewis’ culture that helped lure the team away from Dentons. ‘My sense from talking to them is that they were very attracted to our firm culture, a very integrated one-firm, one-vision culture,’ she said.

Sources: Legal Week; Wall Street Journal