The Legal 500 2020 rankings are announced for Asia-Pacific
Tanner De Witt is proud to once again be recommended this year in The Legal 500 Asia Pacific Guide 2020 for its four main practice areas; corporate and commercial, labour and employment, restructuring and insolvency and litigation and dispute resolution. Notably, partners Ian De Witt, Robin Darton and Kim Boreham have retained their leading individual ranking, while Sunny Hathiramani–promoted to partner in 2019–is recognised as a next generation partner for our top tier Restructuring and Insolvency Practice. The full rankings can be found here.
Dispute resolution: litigation – ranked: tier 3
Tanner De Witt’s ‘very user-friendly’ team provides ‘no-nonsense advice’, and is ‘very strong on shareholder and listed company disputes’. Other areas of instruction for the group include cyber fraud, contentious insolvency cases, and high-value commercial fraud matters. Mark Side stands out for his ‘fantastic knowledge’; he leads the team with Jeff Lane and Pamela Mak. In 2019 Kevin Bowers joined as a consultant from Howse Williams 何韋律師行.
Restructuring and insolvency – ranked: tier 1
‘One of the top insolvency teams in the market’, the three-partner team at Tanner De Witt is highly in demand as a result of its ‘specialised experience combined with practical advice’. Best-known for its contentious prowess, the team receives a raft of mandates from insolvency practitioners (IPs), as well as referral work from international law firms to advise on the Hong Kong aspects of cross-border matters. ‘Two of the most prominent insolvency/restructuring lawyers in Hong Kong’, co-heads Ian De Witt and Robin Darton have ‘great all-round experience’, while recently promoted partner Sunny Hathiramani has a flourishing reputation at a more junior level across a range of insolvency and restructuring issues, in relation to both companies and individuals.
Employment – ranked: tier 2
Tanner De Witt has a ‘fantastic reputation’ representing senior executives and high-profile employees within the financial services sector, in cases related to non-compete clauses, discrimination, breaches of fiduciary duties, unpaid wages and severance payments. The ‘practical and pragmatic’ Kim Boreham provides ‘no-nonsense’ advice to employers and employees across a wide spread of advisory and contentious advice and is a key member of the team that was strengthened in January 2019 by the arrival, at a consultancy level, of high-profile commercial/employment litigator Kevin Bowers from Howse Williams 何韋律師行.
Corporate (including M&A) – ranked: tier 6
Eddie Look, Tim Drew and Edmond Leung jointly lead the Corporate and Commercial team, which is well-known among local businesses operating in the mid-tier segment of the Hong Kong market. It also acts for a significant number of multinational household-name entities. The multifaceted practice covers M&A, joint ventures, reorganisations, licensing and franchising arrangements, private equity transactions, and regulatory compliance, among other matters. Pàdraig Walsh is particularly knowledgeable about various subsets of the technology sector, including fintech, biotech, insurtech, edutech and cleantech. River Stone and Jan Willem Möller (who is dual-qualified to practise in the Netherlands and Hong Kong) are also recommended.
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