Law firms in Asia are competing to hire new staff, as a torrent of Chinese technology companies seeking Hong Kong listings powers a revival in the city’s stock exchange.
It was the world’s most lucrative individual destination for initial public offerings last year, with 119 listings raising HK$287bn ($37bn). This year the exchange has retained the global top spot, with AI and technology companies driving listings in the city to a five-year high in the first quarter.
“It’s been busy for sure,” says Felix Lee, a senior director at legal recruiting firm SSQ, of the past six to nine months. “US firms, UK firms, PRC firms, domestic firms . . . [are all] looking at pretty much the same pool of talent.”
The boom has accelerated as Chinese technology groups capitalise on excitement over the “DeepSeek moment”, when the Hangzhou-based AI company stunned the world with the release of its R1 model in January 2025. It promises capabilities close to those of US peers such as ChatGPT, but at a lower cost.
That reignited interest in Chinese technology groups and triggered the reversal of a two-year slump in capital markets activity in Hong Kong. Tensions between Washington and Beijing have also convinced a number of Chinese companies to seek listings closer to home.
The pace and scale of listings has created a race for legal expertise to work on labour-intensive IPOs. In addition, the great majority of companies hoping to raise money are from mainland China, which means law firms typically need lawyers qualified in Hong Kong who can speak both English and Mandarin to a professional standard.
The IPO boom, which began in late 2024, picked up speed last year. The turnaround means firms have had to rebuild teams that had shrunk when demand and fees ebbed during the prolonged post-pandemic IPO downturn, says Lee. “It used to be a race to the bottom [on fees], but because of the high volume of incoming IPOs that has shifted back.”
Some of the most notable listings in Hong Kong in the past two years include a $4.6bn offering from CATL, the world’s largest electric vehicle battery maker, a $4bn listing from white goods maker Midea and a slew of AI software and hardware companies whose shares have surged since going public.
And while Hong Kong continues to handle a surge in more recent initial public offerings, such as those of Zijin Gold and AI start-up MiniMax in January, it has also been boosted by follow-on offerings from companies already listed elsewhere, particularly mainland China.
Zhang Biyuan, a Hong Kong-based partner at US firm Cleary Gottlieb, worked on last year’s HK$6.7bn ($860mn) fundraising for China’s PonyAI, creating a dual primary listing for the autonomous driving group following its IPO on US exchange Nasdaq a year earlier. She says the law firm has been “super selective” about the deals it works on, partly to ensure that workloads remain reasonable, which will help to attract new hires.
Lawyers work on three to four IPOs per head on average and Cleary likes to ensure they take at least one day off at the weekend where possible. “We try to take care of our colleagues,” she says.
Another persistent challenge for law firms’ hiring plans is how to gauge the duration of the current boom. “This is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem,” she explains. “Nobody knows how long the market boom is going to last, but at the same time we do need people to join us so that, as we continue to expand, we can get on more deals.”
Law firms are trying to judge the likely longevity of higher demand by assessing signals from regulators in both Hong Kong and the mainland — which some believe are designed to cool the boom.
In recent months, regulators have: warned banks over the quality of paperwork for listing applications; proposed “naming and shaming” lawyers and accountants behind shoddy filings; and blocked IPOs by some Chinese companies with opaque offshore structures.
But law firms are also looking at investor enthusiasm for AI, robotics and biotechnology — as well as the potential for US-China tensions to push more New York-listed Chinese companies towards “homecoming” listings in Hong Kong.
“The momentum in Hong Kong . . . is kind of a two-way convergence, both from the investor side and from the company, from the interest side,” says Huang Yongqing, a Beijing-based partner at Jingtian & Gongcheng who has worked on a number of Hong Kong IPOs.
Huang adds that investor enthusiasm for Chinese companies has been helped by the country’s firm reaction to US President Donald Trump’s tariff threats, which pushed Washington to a trade war standstill. “China was deemed as the only one that can play with the US on the trade game. So, from investors’ perspective, China is really not weakening, but strong now,” he says.
As at other law firms, hiring enough staff to keep up with the deal flow is a pressing issue for the Hong Kong practice, he adds.
Michael Yu, a Hong Kong-based partner at US law firm Cooley, has worked on IPOs including those of biotech Insilico Medicine and autonomous driving company WeRide. He says that despite a big expansion of the firm’s mainland China capital markets team, it required the help of new technology to keep up with demand.
“Our headcount increased by nearly 40 per cent in the past year or so, while our deal flow doubled [or] tripled,” he explains. “With AI support, we are able to increase some efficiencies and continue delivering.”
He predicts that those same new technologies will be keeping him busy in the longer term.
“AI is still at the initial stages of the revolution,” he says. “And China is definitely standing at the forefront of all these technology innovations.”
