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Top 10 US firm Morgan Lewis & Bockius has closed its office in the booming southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
The closure comes less than two years after the firm launched the office, initially to provide IP services to tech and life sciences companies in the region.
It follows the office’s managing partner, IP lawyer Shaobin Zhu, moving over to DLA Piper in Seattle last November. The office’s other lawyer, IP managing associate Bo Tang, is also no longer listed on Morgan Lewis’s website.
“We parted ways with our only two lawyers in Shenzhen and reestablished our China-based intellectual property practice in our Shanghai office, where it was initially established in 2017,” Morgan Lewis said in a statement.
The closure leaves Morgan Lewis with three bases in China in Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai. The firm said the offices provide corporate, capital markets, corporate investigations, investment management, employment, litigation and intellectual property services to firm clients through almost 70 lawyers – down from the roughly 90 it had in July 2023 when it opened in Shenzhen.
The firm currently has two lawyers based in China working on IP matters, according to its website – Shanghai-based partner Todd Liao and an associate.
Morgan Lewis’s Shenzhen move continues a wave of office closures and headcount cuts across China by Big Law, amid simmering geopolitical tensions between China and the West, tightening regulation and business drying up as the country’s economy cools.
The lawyer headcount of Am Law 100 firms in Beijing and Shanghai has fallen by 25% over the last two years, according to publicly available data tracked by Pirical, from 569 to 424. The decline over a five-year period is 35%.
Earlier this month Fenwick & West shuttered its Shanghai office, while last year at least 14 Big Law firms announced office closures in Beijing, Shanghai or Hong Kong, among them Milbank, Paul Weiss, Skadden, Morrison & Foerster, Sidley Austin, Weil and Orrick.
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