It is as part of its expansion plan for Southern China that Fangda Partners has recently grown its partner ranks with one lateral hire and two promotions.

New partner Victor Yu (pictured) joined the firm, the winner of the 2010 ALB Shanghai Law Firm of the Year award, from Hogan & Hartson, where he was a counsel and had practised for more than seven years. His practice focuses mainly on private equity and venture capital transactions.

Yu is among several people who have left Hogan's China offices prior to the Hogan Lovells merger. He cited that he had been contemplating this move for a long time and the merger happened to provide him with a good time to leave.

Fangda's two counsels, Benjamin Miao and Frank Li, have been admitted to partnership. Miao, who joined the firm's Shanghai office from Clifford Chance in 2009, and Li, who joined in 2003 in Shenzhen, are both experienced in corporate and commercial disputes.

The new additions to the partnership reflect Fangda's plan to speed up its development in South China, as Yu and Li join partners Luo Ke and Dixon Zhang in the Shenzhen office, which was opened in 2001.

Shenzhen: legal industry in numbers
* 330 firms
* 5,800 lawyers
* 27 offices of Beijing firms
* 7 offices of Shanghai firms
* 2008 total revenue: RMB2.2bn 
"Shenzhen not only has large corporations such as Huawei, ZTE and Ping An but also is home to a great number of fast-growing SMEs. It's a city that also attracts a significant volume of private equity and venture capital investments," said Yu. "However, these companies are relatively underserved by the local legal profession and the local legal industry is still underdeveloped in many ways. So we've decided to strengthen our presence here and take a bigger piece of the action."

Yu also joins a long list of partners and lawyers leaving international firms for local firms. "International firms are mainly advising on China-related cross-border offshore issues, and the competition in that segment is very fierce. However, among all the domestic firms, only a handful of them can really compete for mandates on top-end transactions.  At a leading domestic platform, I can have more potential to reach out to a larger clientele group and work on a wider range of transactions and projects," Yu said. ALB

Related stories: