Asian expansion

International law firm Kirkland & Ellis is relocating two partners to set up a new Asian private equity funds practice, with London partner Justin Dolling and New York partner Albert Cho relocating to Hong Kong in January 2009.
Dolling, who came to Kirkland from SJ Berwin in 2007, advises private equity managers on structuring and creating funds and related buyout work. Both he and Cho have previously worked on Asia-focused funds, including the formation of the $1.9 billion CVC Capital Partners Asia Pacific II and the $1 billion LaSalle Asia Opportunity Fund II. Bruce Ettelson, a senior partner in Kirkland’s private funds practice group, said that as a native Australian Dolling also already has a number of clients based in his home country.
Kirkland launched the Hong Kong office in 2006 and currently has 10 private equity partners there, as well as 25 lawyers in its China practice worldwide. It has advised more than 20 private equity funds on deals such as fund formations and leveraged buyouts, while Dolling and Cho will be the office’s first partners dedicated to fund formation matters.
“They can better service those clients and those existing funds in that time zone,” Ettelson said. “There’s a lot of jurisdictions from which funds going into Asia or money leaving Asia can be in, and we thought that if we were going have full-time fund people on the ground in Hong Kong you want to start with partners, you want to start with critical mass, and any time we expand we want to do it out of strength.”
Since 2006 Kirkland has advised more than 20 private equity funds on deals such as fund formations and leveraged buyouts, and its recent moves are intended to make the law firm more of a “onestop shop” for private equity in the region. Its private equity clients in the region include Bain Capital, Oaktree Capital, Sun Capital and Jayhawk.
“When it comes to private equity, we want to be involved from beginning to end, Ettelson said. “We want to form your fund, we want to do your deals, we want to take them public, we want to recapitalize them; if they go bankrupt we want to be able to do the restructuring work.”
The law firm also represented STATS ChipPAC in a $2.3 billion US-Singaporean going-private transaction last year, and was recently the lead counsel to Advantage Partners in its acquisition of GST AutoLeather, the private equity firm’s first leveraged buyout in Japan. Kirkland is also expanding its China practice with the hiring of partner Xiaoyang Li from Beijing’s Jun He Law offices.
Ettelson says that despite the global downturn analysts have shown that growth in the Asian fund market was higher than Europe in the third quarter.
“We’re not very focused on one-month, two-month, six-month cycles, we try to be long term strategic,” he said.