Welcome to the third annual edition of The Lawyer’s Global Top 30 in Asia Pacific report. The years over which we have been writing these reports have been some of the most transformational in recent times. Working patterns have changed, political tensions have ebbed and flowed, and stringent policies that arose as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic have receded. When we first published this report in 2021, for example, lawyers visiting Hong Kong for work or returning there from abroad had to quarantine for three weeks as part of the local government’s Covid-19 policy. Today, that is a thing of the past and unrestricted travel has returned.
This report ranks the 30 largest international firms by the size of their partnerships in the region and analyses firms’ headcounts in the seven key jurisdictions of China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, Japan and South East Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam). Similarly to last year, this report also stratifies this region into a handful of groups based on the different headcounts at these 30 firms. However, this year we have also sought to analyse what percentage of a firm’s overall partner headcount is based in APAC to give you a helpful sense of how much weight and power lies in the region.
Among this year’s headline findings was that each jurisdiction featured in the report saw a rise in the overall number of partners based there, suggesting that firms are not pulling back from investing in the region. After relatively stagnant growth in total partner headcount figures in 2021, there was a much higher growth rate in 2022. Between 2021 and 2020, overall partner numbers inched up by just 0.4 per cent, from 2,498 to 2,507. That rate rose substantially to a 4.3 per cent increase between 2021 and 2022, from the previous year’s figure to 2,619.
