Only one year after accepting the role of regional head of corporate at Lovells, Greg Terry is leaving the UK firm to become managing director and general counsel for the Asia-Pacific region at Morgan Stanley.

Sitting on the Asia-Pacific executive committee at the investment bank, Hong Kong-based Terry will oversee the legal and regulatory functions. He will report to Alasdair Morrison, chairman and chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley Asia, and London-based Keith Clark, international general counsel.

Terry was previously a director and group general counsel at Hong Kong conglomerate Jardine Matheson Group, where he worked with Morrison for 10 years. "He and I make a really good team and that was a big plus," he said.

Terry succeeds David Graham who moved to UBS at the start of May. He joins Morgan Stanley on 1 August but, in an unconventional arrangement, will continue to consult Lovells on strategic issues when needed.

"Since he joined last year, Greg has been helping with strategy and this allows us to continue to benefit from that," said Hong Kong-based Timothy Hill, head of the projects (construction and engineering) group at Lovells in Asia.

Hill said Lovells had primarily worked with Morgan Stanley in Europe but had completed some projects in Asia. The firm hopes the appointment of Terry will help strengthen that relationship, particularly in the areas of corporate and capital markets. Terry would only say: "[Lovells] will receive work [from Morgan Stanley] in a way it hasn't before."

With Lovells' partnership structure stipulating a compulsory retirement age of 62 years, the firm only ever hired 59 year-old Terry on 16 June last year as its new regional head of corporate on a temporary basis.

Hill admitted the firm had hoped Terry would stay with them for a few more years. But Terry said the lure of such a senior role in one of the leading investment houses - which operates an open-ended retirement structure - was too strong to resist, particularly as so much had been achieved in his year at Lovells.

"We were all planning that I would do this for two years at least, but we are a lot further along in growing a full platform of work than we planned," he said.

He cited doubling the number of corporate lawyers in Beijing to 24 and the office opening in Shanghai as two major achievements. "The place [Lovells] can well do without me now and I can be of more use where I'm going. And it's not like I'm going to a competitor, which I would never have done."

Rather than replacing Terry's regional corporate role, Hill said Lovells would decide in the next few months on new corporate heads for each of its offices in Asia. "We don't at this stage envisage installing another Greg Terry," he said.

Following his 10-year stint at Jardine Matheson, Terry was Credit Suisse First Boston's managing director and vice chairman of the Pacific region, as well as Australia head, in Melbourne for three years. More recently, he was CEO of Singapore-based investment company BIL International until 2002, when he set up his own investment firm, Eastsound Square, in Seattle.