Zhong Lun Law Firm adds senior counsel Sophie Chen to its Beijing office, and welcomes partner Li Wei and senior consultant Ren Ke to its Shenzhen office.
Chen is a cross-border M&A specialist in the mining and natural resources sector, and she brings 27 years of experience to the Beijing office.
She advised on many mining projects in Australia, including Yancoal Australia’s USD2.5 billion capital raising that funded its acquisition of Rio Tinto’s Coal & Allied – it was the largest mining deal in the country in 2017.
Aside from M&A, she also specialises in dispute resolution and intellectual property and is a triple-qualified lawyer in the mainland, Hong Kong and Australia.She had worked as a partner at MinterEllison and head of China practice at Gilbert + Tobin in Australia before joining JunHe in China in 2022.
Li is a wealth planning specialist who has been practising for two decades. He co-developed China’s first semi-standardised family trust product with a trust company and several other trusts of the same nature in the mainland.
Before joining Zhong Lun, he was an equity partner and China region director at Yingke Law Firm where he headed the firm’s family wealth committee and family legal affairs centre. He was also a former partner at SD & Partners and Wisdom & Fortune Law Firm.
Ren, an intellectual property specialist, returns to Zhong Lun after seven years in Longan Law Firm. He is known for his patent dispute resolution cases, several of them were named by the Supreme People’s Court, Fujian Higher People’s Court and Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court as signature cases. Those cases include the patent infringement dispute between Hisky Medical and Echosens over a liver fibrosis detection system, as well as Midea and AO Smith’s patent fight.
