2018 In Review | DFDL Thailand

DFDL Thailand Managing Director, Audray Souche

We wanted to share a bit of our assessment of what 2018 has been for DFDL Thailand.

It’s been an exciting year with a number of key changes. The first change, which you can see here, is our new office. We moved to a new office in January 2018 – and after having almost spent one year here, we feel that it has really taken DFDL Thailand to a new level.

We are here in the middle of the vibrant Bangkok business center. We have a nice view. It’s a simple but elegant design, very practical. We have more space, and we have more people.

Those new people always indicate where we are moving. Walanchathas, who has joined in January 2018 to insufflate a new dynamic for our Thai outbound practice, definitely rejuvenated this practice.

But this is not something which is based on one individual, and this is a dynamic that I feel is almost everywhere in this new office, even our senior Thai partner, Khun Rashane, is doing Thai outbound work. Myself, I have always been doing regional work with an outbound component, and that’s definitely where we are. DFDL is positioning itself to accompany our clients in developing their regional strategy.

We have also a number of new regional advisors. So of course because Bangkok is attractive all of the time, so a number of our young colleagues have moved to Bangkok and they are using their experience in different countries to develop regional value in complement to our Thai law practice. So again this is a lot about this regional approach, and DFDL Thailand is a very important starting point for that approach.

So the third key change is about our new sister. Kinstellar is like DFDL, an original firm operating in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Both firms have entered into a venture, whereby each firm will keep an independent legal practice.

So we keep our name, and everything is the same, but we are sharing the support function, what we call the backbone. Martin Desautels – our original managing partner – and Jason Mogg met four years ago and started to realize that our firms were so similar in the concept. This is definitely a new challenge and exciting times, both for DFDL partners and Kinstellar partners, and for DFDL Thailand given our regional central location. Definitely it will open opportunities for multiple interactions with our new sister.

So after these words about the changes in 2018 at DFDL Thailand, it’s time to thank you all. To thank first our clients for their continued trust over years, over months, over weeks. New clients and historical clients, coming from everywhere.

Historically we have had a more geographical focused clientele, and we see how the origin of our clients is diversifying. This is clearly an evolution over the last 5-10 years. So we have obviously a strong relationship with French clients, but we also have a growing number of Chinese clients.

And our China desk, which is a regional desk, is represented here in Thailand by Ivy Liu, the head of this group, and has contributed to the development of our Chinese practice. And this makes our experience unique in terms of intercultural exchanges, in terms of the types of business we are looking at to assist.

And I think this rich diversity is making the professional experience of our lawyers again unique. So the key for us is to ensure that our relationships are always at the forefront of our work, our availability, our sense of listening to your feedback, our capacity to understand your business model. This is very important, almost more important nowadays in our job than the technical legal stuff.

And this relationship will determine the value of the services we can provide to you, and that’s definitely what we are focusing on, and what we will continue focusing on in 2019.

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