Promoting useful contributions to the financial services industry
Who is JML? What it is that we stand for? Where do we fit in this world?
JML | Jeffrey Mak Law Firm is a specialized corporate finance law firm with a view to improving the financial services industry of Hong Kong through legal methodologies, such as deal point analysis assisted by court decision statistics and other public data.
Hong Kong is one of the top international financial centers in the world.
Our lawyers are fortunate in having advised on some landmark deals in Hong Kong’s history, including:
- Advising on the first GEM IPO in the history of Hong Kong
- Advising on the first “contemporaneous” A+H share IPO in China and Hong Kong
- Advising on the first migration of an H share company from GEM to the Main Board of Hong Kong
- Advising on the first major takeover and privatization of a locally listed bank by an A+H share listed mainland bank
Our lawyers grew up together with the development of the modern financial services industry of Hong Kong, and we are committed to strengthening the status of Hong Kong as an international financial center. While we are only making a very small difference, if any, we hope that more people will map out their own paths in promoting the prosperity of Hong Kong’s financial and securities markets and add to the positive energy that Hong Kong has been proud of.
To this end, we research regularly on legal issues affecting the financial services industry and publish commentaries and updates in the “PUBLICATIONS” section of this website.
Our Methodologies
We focus on generating two types of guidelines and toolkits for assisting two separate kinds of people in corporations: (1) decision-makers on key issues regarding transactions and operations; and (2) execution personnel and compliance support teams who take care of the integrity of transactions and operations for underpinning the modern financial services systems with proper track records. Their needs are different. However, communication and integration between them are crucial.
People with legal education are a special genre of intellectuals in society. They are privileged to have been equipped with the training and capability of researching into and visioning with clarity important issues. In our society, they can show to others the limits of legal restrictions underlying transactions, the judicial interpretations of legal provisions, and the boundaries of the requirements of due process. As they can understand the reasoning of judges, they know how contractual provisions should be drafted to achieve the objectives of contractual parties.
We are driving Statistics Unwoven Deal Points Analysis (SUDPA), a proprietary method of analyzing deal issues in corporate finance transactions via published deal statistics. This may, for instance, facilitate the finding of positions acceptable to the parties by reference to common treatment of the deal issues according to published statistics, or assist contractual parties in understanding how legal provisions would be enforced by courts or arbitral tribunals.
Our lawyers are committed to innovating our practice. In deal execution, we try to provide “meaning” to the execution process, rather than follow procedures routinely without due regard to the purposes they are designed for. We produce plain-language, easy-to-understand guides to investors and issuers for corporate actions (examples include rights issue guides to investors, deal structuring analytics, post-completion integration handbooks, financial services regulatory updates and compliance training materials). In delivering our services, we devise and adopt procedures that seek to produce the results effectively and efficiently as we believe that, with purpose-oriented execution, economy is a necessary and crucial element in the process. To the extent legally permitted, keeping the process simple and user-friendly is another key element.
People usually already have available tools, that they truly need, to produce results. Deal execution is very much about designing the optimal procedures, based on available resources, to achieve results. Planning with a view to achieving economy is our guide. Removing unnecessary steps can speed up the process, save costs and make life easier for the participating teams.
We believe that Hong Kong’s unique history of financial prosperity over the recent decades, coupled with the opulence of corporate disclosure and media reporting, has a lot to offer to the modern corporate community. In a few areas we focus on, we collect and analyze deal mechanisms to develop our practice. Driven by an aspiration to excel, our people, who came from diverse extended backgrounds and training, know our worth and what makes us feel great in our service delivery. Compliance is one of our means and techniques to add value; we see compliance as a pathway to bring out the true “meaning” of processes in a fair and balanced manner to market participants concerned. Equipped with our available resources, we seek to create value, pursue new paths and go the extra mile or two. By making ourselves visible through this website, we hope to increase the awareness of corporates towards improving corporate finance practices. It is our desire to collaborate with people sharing the same vision and values.
Any enquiries may be sent to our principal:
Jeffrey Mak at jeffrey.mak@jmaklegal.com (telephone number: +852 2692 3999)
