About

Marco Chung is the regional head of legal for the private funds team and the investment banking M&A team at international finance giant Morgan Stanley, and leads a team consisting of two senior lawyers on deal documents, three contract lawyers working on pre-deal documentation, a transaction team, one senior lawyer for deal documents relating to M&A and four corporate secretarial professionals. Chung has been leading the private funds legal team since 2015 and took over the management of the M&A team in 2018. In the last year, Chung’s team worked on the fund formation of the Thai single country private equity fund, the first fund of its kind raised by an international general partner. Given the lack of precedents, the fund formation has been a complicated task from inception, and has included matters ranging from domicile of the fund vehicle, tax structuring, education of limited partners, marketing restrictions. As Chung says, these aspects have ‘all required the legal team to think not just as a lawyer but to appreciate that the role of a lawyer is to facilitate deal doing’. The legal system and landscape of Thailand are also new things that the team needed to acquaint itself with during this time. Chung stresses the importance of team culture, and identifies that he does not micro manage, preferring to ‘give each team member sufficient breathing space to grow and develop. If team members need support either to progress a deal or to push back on anything unreasonable, [Chung] is always there’. Given the deal facilitating nature of the team and how Morgan Stanley is a transaction-oriented business, it is clear that Chung’s team’s success is built on its nimble responses to changes in regulatory and tax regimes. Furthermore, as both private fund and IBD businesses operate in a wide range of Asian jurisdictions ranging from China to Australia, the team’s appreciation of cultural differences also add to its attributes and help it achieve success.