Joseph Andrew couldn’t curb his enthusiasm. It was a frigid morning in New York, days ahead of the Jan. 26 ceremony in which Dentons tied the knot with Dacheng, China’s largest firm. Andrew, Dentons’ voluble global chairman, jogged to a PowerPoint slide highlighting the soon-to-be combined firms’ 120 locations and pointed to the 43 dots inside China, Dacheng’s major contribution to the combination.
The logic of such a deal, Andrew told a reporter, was evident. “In each of these Chinese cities, significant enterprises are being born, none of which are content to do business only in China. Getting to them first gives us a chance of winning that new business,” he said.
