International Law

Oops! They Did It Again

Law firm mergers seem to be coming on a daily basis, or at least as often as the Law Times turns up on my desk (twice weekly).

This time it’s Kim Chang & Lee ("Korea’s oldest law firm") and Kim & Company who are merging to form a 40-something mid-sized firm, also with ambition to double its mass in the next two years. All of these mergers have the ambition to double their headcount in an impossibly short time, it seems. (Of course, this begs the question—if such hyper-growth is so easy to come by, why weren’t you growing at that rate before? Guess this means the new firm will remain prowling for further merger candidates.)

Kim & Company is a banking and finance-focused practice formed from a team which left Lee & Ko in 2001.

KIm Chang & Lee has been through the merger process before. In 2005 or 2006—I don’t remember—the firm attempted to merge with acquisitive Barun Law, moving most of its lawyers from Kim Chang & Lee’s Insa-dong offices down to Barun’s Samsung-dong (near COEX) offices (at least the biographies disappeared from Kim Chang & Lee’s website and appeared on Barun’s) before reappearing in 2007 in an apparent unwinding of the merger.

The two firms will operate under the Korean name Yang-Heon (??). The English name hasn’t been announced yet; both firms’ websites are irregularly updated (you can get news from 1995 on the Kim Chang & Lee website, but nothing past 2002). Of course, our firm’s website is no treat either—Korean firms haven’t caught on to the power of the Internet for marketing purposes.

Full post as published by Korea Law Blog on July 29, 2008 (boomark / email).