Poh Lee Tan, Asia-Pacific regional chairman of Baker & McKenzie, talks to ALB about what distinguishes her firm from rival international firms.
Everyone, it seems, likes to call themselves international. Whether a firm happens to have a worldwide network of ‘best friends’, a joint venture overseas or even a couple of representative offices, it seems that every law firm is now claiming international status, complete with a stylised globe spinning somewhere on each firm’s website or logo.
But as Poh Lee Tan, Asia-Pacific Regional Chairman of Baker & McKenzie, points out, some firms have been in the international arena longer than others. A lot longer, as it happens. Baker & McKenzie’s Asian presence, for example, dates back to 1963 when the firm opened its Manila office. “We’ve been in Asia longer than most [international] firms and that long association with the region means that we’ve been able to attain a point of critical mass in terms of reputation and scale,” says Tan.
The firm is sometimes described as ‘Chicago-based’, largely because of its Chicago origins. However, the real business of running the firm is performed by an executive committee on which all regions are more or less evenly represented. “That’s a key point of difference – we don’t regard any one city or country as our headquarters,” says Tan. And unlike firms that derive the bulk of their income through a principal office such as London or New York, Baker & McKenzie derived only about a third of its revenues from the Americas in the 2008 fiscal year, while Asia accounted for 26%.
The firm also pursues a genuinely international outlook by recruiting locally: “We don’t enter new markets by parachuting in lawyers from a home base,” says Tan. “Instead, our partners understand and appreciate the subtle nuances of legal and business issues in the different geographies where we operate across the globe, while having a global perspective.”
India and Korea
With Clifford Chance having recently entered into a ‘best friends’ agreement with major Indian firm AZB, rival international firms will no doubt be reviewing their own Indian arrangements. Baker & McKenzie has traditionally not gone down the path of establishing representative offices, believing that such operations will not deliver the necessary level of scale and quality of service. But a ‘best friends’ or associate firm agreement is certainly not out of the picture. “We do not close off options, in India or anywhere else,” says Tan. She has long been an enthusiastic proponent of further engagement in the Indian market: “The global nature of Indian companies and the way they buy assets everywhere is very exciting,” she says. The choice of a partner firm, however, will not be dictated by size alone, with Tan nominating compatible culture, client base and practice skills as additional key criteria.
Korea is another jurisdiction where a partner firm might be an option, although Tan says that this matter has not received as much attention as the Indian options to date. “Korea is a different market – Korean clients have been a part of the firm for a long time and Korean companies went international before the Indian companies,” she says.
Diversity
Diversity is becoming increasingly important for clients, says Tan. “Clients want to be represented by law firms who place an important emphasis on diversity, so having women in leadership positions in the firm helps to demonstrate our commitment to diversity.” But she points out that she is far from being the first woman to be a member of the executive committee at Baker & McKenzie, citing one well known example in former chairman Christine Lagarde, now Minister of Finance of France.
While diversity has only recently come to the fore in corporate parlance, Tan says that in her experience, Baker & McKenzie has always been a remarkably diverse firm, even from the days when she first joined 24 years ago, although the firm does not set quotas for representation of particular groups.
“Baker & McKenzie is a meritocracy, and always has been from day one,” says Tan, “It would be wrong, for example, to promote someone simply because of his or her gender. But what we do instead is groom that person and give him or her the opportunity to learn the skills that person needs in order to advance.”