ALB’s Employer of Choice, its annual survey of the best law firms to work for in Asia, is closing on March 3, Friday.

Submissions are open for the ALB 2017 Intellectual Property Rankings.

Litigators are duty-bound in protecting the lawful rights and interests of the parties concerned, maintaining the correct implementation of laws and safeguarding equity and justice and Asian Legal Business (“ALB”) has been attaching great importance to the work of litigators. The ALB’s research team for this year has conducted the survey of the court cases for which judgments were pronounced between January 1 and December 31, 2016 as represented by all the nominated lawyers and made selection based on the influence and difficulty of the cases as well as the feedbacks from the clients and market about the cases.

On 12 January 2017, ZHIHU, the largest knowledge sharing platform in China, announced the completion of its Series D financing.

ALB China Employer of Choice 2017 survey is now open to employees working for the law firms’ office(s) in mainland China.

ALB once again celebrates Asia’s most innovative law firms – firms that are finding new ways to tackle old problems as they look to offer value to their clients, run their businesses better, and remain ahead of the game.

With the economic development, in order to meet the requirement of clients on high-standard service and lower the cost, many law firms have transformed from large law firms into boutique and specialized ones. In this process, many excellent small and medium-sized law firms emerged in China and they continuously enhance their business capabilities in different practice areas through unremitted efforts.

China Huadian Capital Holdings Co., Ltd. was recently approved by China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) (Zheng Jian Xu Ke [2016] No. 2088) to issue up to RMB 2 billion worth of corporate bonds to qualified investors. Zhong Lun Law Firm provided legal services as the legal advisor to the issuer throughout the bond offering process. The Zhong Lun team is led by Partner Sun Wei, and other team members including Gu Yue and Xu Dongwei. J.P. Morgan First Capital Securities Co., Ltd. acted as the lead underwriter for the project, and CITIC Securities and Chuancai Securities acted as co-underwriters.

On Dec 16, 2016, BOC Consumer Finance Co., Ltd. made history as the issuer of the first financial bond ever offered by a Chinese consumer finance company on the national interbank bond market. Zhong Lun Law Firm serves as the legal advisor for the project, providing the issuer with legal services throughout the bond issue process.

Dentons Hong Kong, in collaboration with Dentons Kunming and Shanghai, advised Yunnan Provincial Energy Investment Group Co., Ltd. ("YEIG") in a dual tranche offering of US$440m of notes (US$310m of 3.50% guaranteed notes due 2019 and US$130m of 4.25% guaranteed notes due 2021) issued by a special purpose vehicle of YEIG. YEIG is a leading state-owned energy company based in Yunnan Province, China. The notes are listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.