King & Wood Mallesons

The ‘energetic and very responsive’ team at King & Wood Mallesons provides ’commercially astute’ advice to contractors, SOEs and developers across the full swathe of their construction needs, at the front-end and throughout the life-cycle of a project, as well as in any pursuant litigation. The team has a collaborative approach which manifests itself internally through a close working relationship alongside other adjacent practice groups, and externally alongside in-house counsel, as well as – in the context of litigation – with counsel and experts. Under the guidance of the ‘efficient and hardworking’ team head Paul Starr, the group is well-placed to handle projects/disputes in Hong Kong as well as across Mainland China and throughout Asia Pacific, where it can marshal and mobilise the firm’s very impressive international resources. Starr himself combines ’exceptional strategic insight with an uncanny knack of identifying winning strategies’, and is one of many in the team with extensive arbitration skills in the sector. ‘Always prepared to go the extra mile’, Donovan Ferguson is another very accomplished litigator who achieves a high success rate for clients through his ability to combine a ’level-headed objective’ approach to disputes with an ‘in-depth level of contextual and situational awareness’. The ’polished, unflappable and courageous’ Edmund Wan also regularly handles arbitrations, mediations and conventional litigation in the construction sector, alongside more general construction-based commercial contracts prowess. On the non-contentious front, Sam Farrands is very well-versed at advising stakeholders on the front-end of infrastructure and energy projects, and has also been involved in every Hong Kong-based PPP transaction in the past four years. Other key practitioners include Scott Gardiner , for renewables and data centre construction matters; the ‘elegant, sharp and dedicated’ Lucinda McPhee ; and Gisele Vanderweerden.