Asialaw 2016 rankings announced

Asialaw has announced its 2016 rankings for Hong Kong law firms and Tanner De Witt is pleased to be highly recommended for several of its primary practice areas; dispute resolution, restructuring and insolvency and labour and employment. We are also recommended for our corporate/M&A practice.

Review from Asialaw rankings 2016

Tanner De Witt (TDW) is an independent law firm whose primary focus is business law in Asia. Established in 1999, the firm has a team of more than 60, including 30 Hong Kong lawyers providing commercial legal advice in core areas covering litigation, corporate and commercial, restructuring and insolvency and employment law.

The dispute resolution practice is the largest in the firm, with six partners and 11 lawyers. Its co-head Mark Side is widely recognised as one of Hong Kong’s most prominent litigators. He works on contentious regulatory matters, offshore disputes, white collar crime and restrictive covenant disputes.

Pamela Mak and Jeff Lane are the other co-heads of the practice. Lane was promoted to partner at the start of 2015. Mak is a commercial litigator valued by her clients for her fluency in English, Cantonese and Mandarin. Her work includes cross-border probate proceedings and Sino-American automobile and telecommunications disputes. Lane’s focus is financial fraud disputes, asset tracing and cyber fraud.

Ian De Witt, a founding partner of the firm, has been practising commercial litigation and insolvency throughout his career. In addition to acting for liquidators, receivers, creditors and directors, he has also acted for various parties in investigations and prosecutions carried out by the Independent Commission Against Corruption, the Commercial Crime Bureau, Securities and Futures Commission and Confederation of Insurance Brokers Disciplinary Tribunal. Like De Witt, Robin Darton practises litigation and contentious insolvency and restructuring matters. He works on winding-up proceedings, appointment of liquidators, claims against directors and auditors, and creditor schemes of arrangement.

Darton is leading a team which includes rising star Tim Au in assisting the liquidators of the Hong Kong arm of OW Bunker Group, a marine fuel supplier and Denmark’s second largest company. The company collapsed after a US$125 million fraud case in Singapore and is now subject to many complex legal issues over security, cross-border insolvency and maritime law. The team has been advising on the security granted by ING, dealing with the receivers and the suppliers across several jurisdictions. The value of the matter is in the region of US$1 billion.

TDW’s employment department is headed by two very experienced partners, Kim Boreham and Russell Bennett, who routinely assist employers and senior executives on Hong Kong employment law. Bennett has a strong interest in employment disputes in the financial sector where he acted for a private bank in defending a substantial claim brought by a senior executive for breach of trust and confidence. Over the past 12 months, the department has been advising on an increasing number of claims involving sex, race and disability discrimination.

The three partners and six associates in the corporate and M&A team acted for clients such as MPayMe, a Hong Kong technology start-up company, in the sale of its shares to the UK’s Powa Technologies, to create the world’s leading mobile payment system provider for the retail, telecommunications, and utility industries, and Foodpanda, an a global online food delivery company based in Berlin, which took over one part of Dial-a-Dinner, a Hong Kong food delivery company.