K&L Gates has bolstered its cross-border transactional practice with the addition of an experienced partner from a competitor in Washington.
Grace Parke Fremlin, a founder and co-chair of the Korea practice at Steptoe & Johnson, has moved over to the corporate and M&A practice at K&L Gates’s office in the capital. Fremlin is also a former chair of the Asia practice at Foley & Lardner. Fremlin’s practice encompasses cross-border trade, investment, and M&A as well as non-transactional areas such as corporate governance, regulatory compliance, patents and licensing, and disputes. A leitmotif of many of her areas of specialization is an emphasis on evolving technologies.
“In the decades I’ve been practicing law, what has changed is the importance of technology. Every aspect of our lives and the business of my global clients, particularly the ones in high-technology businesses, are affected and the legal specialties that are in demand have shifted to more IP protection, enforcement and litigation,” Fremlin told IFLR1000.
Yet the nature of Fremlin’s practice has been highly fluid over the course of her career, in keeping with manifold shifts in the focus of trade and investment between the US and Asia.
In the 1980s, early in Fremlin’s career, she worked as a California-based lawyer at Graham & James, a firm whose devotion to deals involving Asian parties and assets reportedly surpassed that of other transactional law firms. In that role, Fremlin handled FDI investments into the US from Japan, while launching manufacturing operations for Japanese businesses and closing commercial loans for Japanese and Korean banks. Then, in the 1990s, Fremlin changed gears and focused on structuring and providing counsel on investments from the US into China, she recalled. Yet another shift occurred in the 2000s, as Fremlin reverted to working on US inbound FDI, now for Korean global clients.
Fremlin noted that recent years have seen heavy inflows of FDI investments from China.
“With the Chinese US inbound FDI, there are two additional factors that differ from the inflow of capital from Japan and Korea. One is the regulatory approvals like CFIUS which arise from national security concerns, and second is the shift from 'green fields' FDI investments by the Japanese and Koreans for their home-grown global brands to acquisitions FDI investments preferred by the Chinese to buy US (and EU) global brands,” she observed.
At this juncture, lawyers active in this space often have a heavy caseload of regulatory enforcement compliance work. Fremlin mentioned, as examples, US antitrust and FCPA enforcement investigations and actions.
“The Korean global companies now understand what huge risks the US antitrust enforcement has created for them. And, more recently, the European companies have been hit hard by US FCPA and anticorruption investigations. On top of that, US trade remedies, dumping investigations, countervailing duty investigations, and, of course, the ITC unfair trade practices investigations at the ITC based mostly on allegations of patent and trademark infringements,” Fremlin said.
Fremlin has given numerous presentations on issues of cross-border trade and investment, and has published articles on the same topics in Bloomberg Corporate Law Journal, China Business Review, and other publications. She holds a JD from University of Virginia School of Law and a BA from George Washington University.