Law firm Incisive poaches veteran shipping litigator from Rajah & Tann

Veteran shipping litigator John Seow has quit as a partner at top Singapore law firm Rajah & Tann to join newcomer Incisive Law in the wake of that firm’s break-up with Ince & Co.

“John joins Incisive as head of litigation,” Incisive joint managing director Wai Yue Loh told TradeWinds.

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Seow formally quit his Rajah & Tann partnership a week ago but started work at Incisive on Monday.

But more changes are in the wind at Incisive, as it prepares to partner an as-yet-unnamed global London maritime firm, and builds up its own team at both senior and mid-level, Loh said.

Some Incisive team members are coming from the former tie-up with Ince, and bring former Ince clients with them, while Seow comes from the biggest regional legal practice in South East Asia, with a practice much bigger than shipping.

Loh is a former partner on Ince’s Shanghai team, and also the founding head of Ince’s Beijing office. He has run Incisive on the maritime side for several years alongside his non-maritime colleague, Bill Ricquier, first in a relationship with Ince and then over a period of transition when the relationship was ambiguous, as Ince teetered towards this year’s breakdown.

Incisive was set up as the Singapore side of a “formal law alliance” with an Ince entity, under an arrangement that allows global legal firms to serve legal clients in the city-state without violating Singapore law.

Seow’s former firm, Rajah & Tann Singapore, boasts a team of hundreds of lawyers in its home base plus affiliate practices in several Asian countries, and is a large and plugged-in player in the political establishment in Singapore. The Rajah & Tann Singapore website lists 19 lawyers in its maritime practice, after the recent deletion of Seow’s page.

Incisive, by contrast, has six director-level lawyers, four of whom are “very much on the shipping and commodities side, especially in contentious law”, Loh said, plus a growing practice in sale-and-purchase under Malaysian associate Roland Chooi, plus nine or 10 junior lawyers.

About half the current team were already on board during the tie-up that left Incisive with an Ince-flavoured name.

Early in his career, Loh worked as a trainee at Rajah & Tann when the older Seow was already a specialist there in contentious matters and the “wet work” side of shipping law. Seow had sailed for Neptune Orient Lines as a marine engineer before qualifying as a lawyer.

“There are not many Singapore maritime lawyers left with that kind of background,” Loh said.

Other new hires are in the works, and Loh singled out Grace Goh, who was on secondment to Ince Beijing along with Loh for the past three years. Like Seow, Goh is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (FCIArb).

“Grace returns to the mothership in Singapore later this month,” Loh said.

Before additional training in maritime law, Goh had a background in prosecuting fraud and white-collar crime for the Singapore attorney-general’s chambers.