chinawww.asianlegalonline.com recently published an article on the recent boom in Chinese law. Two years ago in 2004, everyone in China, including law offices, were suffering from the effects of SARS. People were afraid to go out on the street and business suffered. Many people were downsizing because of the lack of work. Still, amazingly enough, investment in 2004 managed to give 2003’s record numbers a run for the money. For example, mergers and acquisitions deals in 2003 amounted to $54 billion US and in 2004 it was just a little lower at about $50 billion. As an indicator, that pointed to a strong year for business in 2005--if China remained SARS free. And 2005 has avoided major SARS scares and industry boomed. That's good for law firms. Two Chinese law firms have hired over 100 new employees in one year. Though Lehman, Lee & Xu didn’t hire quite that many, our firm is still the 3rd largest law firm in China, with 218 total employees and 201 of those are lawyers. That also puts us at the 26th largest law firm in Asia. Every Monday, our firm holds a morning meeting where Mr. Lehman asks if there is anybody new in one of the three offices that attend the teleconference. It seems there usually a positive response.
But with this massive growth, the problem isn’t finding enough work, it is finding enough qualified people to do the work. For example, at this point our Spanish department is looking for two more people who, of course, need to speak good Spanish. They’ve been looking for months and interviewed many people with no positive results. So they are stuck with more work than they can do. That, of course, is both a good thing and a bad thing.
