London-based Memery Crystal has signed an exclusive cooperation agreement with Beijing-headquartered Yingke.
Yingke is one of the largest firms in China by lawyer headcount and revenue. According to The Lawyer’s 2015 China Elite report, it was ranked sixth by revenue, as it generated RMB900m in 2014. Its network has over 4,000 lawyers worldwide and over 50 offices in Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Memery Crystal is ranked as the 127th-largest UK firm by revenue in the latest The Lawyer UK200 report. It turned over £15.6m in the 2014/15 financial year with 58 fee-earners, which included 20 partners.
The firm said that its new alliance with Yingke was designed to increase access for both firms’ clients to new business opportunities.
“Central to this partnership are our clients and those of Yingke,” said Memery Crystal CEO Lesley Gregory. “In a rapidly evolving international market in which Memery Crystal is increasingly active, we are determined to offer inbound and outbound access to our clients and this, in conjunction with the new China Centre, delivers exactly that.”
Yingke’s global managing partner Mei Xiangrong described its cooperation deal with Memery Crystal as long-term and exclusive.
“We have established close relationships with professional services firms in financial centres around the world. London is a major financial centre and Memery Crystal is a high-quality law firm with whom we’re delighted to work exclusively,” said Mei.
At the same time Yingke has launched the Yingke London China Centre in London, a standalone corporate entity that will act as a platform for Chinese investors into the UK as well as for UK businesses looking to do business in China.
The two firms’ cooperation agreement will leverage the newly established Yingke London China Centre, which will promote reciprocal trade and investment between organisations in the UK and China and provide commercial advice to Chinese and UK businesses and ultra high net worth individuals. The centre will also identify opportunities and facilitate transactions originated through the firm’s network of offices.
The centre will be led by Yingke CEO Marie Li, who is also the Chinese founder of British China International Consulting. She will be joined on the board by non-executive director Bijan Sedghi, formerly a partner at legacy Wragge & Co and now a non-executive director at Memery Crystal.
Memery Crystal joins a growing array of UK firms to have entered into a cooperation agreement with a Chinese firm. Most recently, Kennedys formalised a long-term relationship with Chinese firm AnJie and Stephenson Harwood formed an alliance with Guangzhou-based boutique firm Wei Tu.
My opinion: firms like Yinke and Memery Crystal, which are more modest enterprises than the likes of KWM and DENTONS, may exploit Chinese inbound and outbound business traffic quite profitably. The key is creating customer expectations that you can easily satisfy. KWM and DENTONS are chasing the big end of town – are they over-promising on the Asian powerhouse model? Yinke and Memery Crystal are chasing the bottom of the pyramid – lower value customers and more of them. I hope they won’t inflate expectations beyond what their combined Chinese:English bandwidth can deliver. If they don’t stretch the truth, their customers will be happy.