Top Japanese law firm Nishimura & Asahi is building its European footprint with office launches in London and Brussels.

The offices will open by early 2025, the firm said, and be led respectively by M&A partner Yoshiyuki Kizu and antitrust and competition partner Kojiro Fujii. 

News of the launches follows the 800-lawyer firm becoming the first among Japan’s ‘Big Four’ to establish an on-the-ground presence in Europe when it opened two offices in Germany in 2020, avoiding London at the time due to concerns over Brexit. 

Nishimura pointed out that London had maintained its position as a global hub for M&A and finance even after Brexit and was where many Japanese law firms had their European headquarters, adding that having a presence there and in Brussels, as the centre of EU policy and regulation, was “critical” for providing optimal support to clients.  

The London office will advise on cross-border M&A, corporate and financial transactions, while the Brussels office will serve as a base for matters relating to EU competition law, international trade law, sustainability, digital and related public policies. 

Both teams will include Japanese and local lawyers, who are expected to collaborate with the firm’s existing offices in Frankfurt and Dusseldorf to support clients on M&A and project-related matters across Europe. 

Kizu, who made partner at Nishimura in 2020, focuses on cross-border deals work, particularly in Europe. Fujii’s practice covers competition law, international trade law, digital regulation and public policy. He was previously the deputy director of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan and also worked for Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in Washington DC. 

Nishimura’s European expansion follows it registering as a foreign law joint enterprise last year, a move intended to make the firm more appealing to international deal lawyers by enabling them to become full equity partners and therefore better able to compete with international firms for cross-border work. 

That followed Big Four rival Anderson Mori & Tomotsune making the same structural change in 2020, with the firm increasingly attracting non-Japanese talent as a result. 

Anderson Mori is also the only other member of the Big Four to have an on-the-ground presence in Europe, debuting there in London in 2022. It followed that up with a Brussels launch earlier this year. 

The other Big Four firms are Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu and Mori Hamada & Matsumoto.