Reed Smith has hired disputes lawyers Peter Glover and Nick Austin as partners in its transportation industry group. Glover joins from Norton Rose Fulbright and will be based in the firm’s Hong Kong office, specialises in shipping, international trade, arbitration, regulation and marine insurance. He comes from a maritime background having served at sea with the oil majors, is a qualified Master Mariner and will enhance the firm’s growing shipping and casualty team in the wider Asia Pacific region. He is qualified to practice law in the jurisdictions of Hong Kong, England & Wales and Queensland, Australia. Austin joins the London office from Clyde & Co, specialises in shipping and international trading disputes in the court, arbitration and mediation arenas. He is a well-known and highly regarded practitioner with more than 20 years’ experience advising shipowners, operators, charterers and traders on a wide range of predominantly dry shipping and commodities disputes, including charterparty and bill of lading issues. Austin also works closely with several commodity trading and mining clients, and maintains strong and enduring links in the Japanese and wider Asian markets.
Sidley Austin has hired Meng Ding as a partner in its China corporate and finance group based in Hong Kong. He joins from Kirkland & Ellis, where he was a partner in the firm’s capital markets practice group. Ding has extensive experience in a broad spectrum of capital markets and M&A transactions, especially in the TMT, healthcare, financial institutions, hard-tech and other emerging technology fields. He has advised on numerous Hong Kong and US IPOs and follow-on offerings, pre-IPO investments, US public company going-private transactions and Rule 144A and Regulation S bond offerings (investment grade and high-yield). He also regularly advises US-listed companies on SEC compliance, exchange reporting and other general corporate matters. Ding received a PhD in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds 31 issued US patents. Earlier in his career, he was a high-tech research and development technologist in Silicon Valley, where he focused on new product development.
