UK firm Bird & Bird has hired a senior in-house lawyer to head up its Asian intellectual property (IP) enforcement practice.

James Luo has joined the firm’s Beijing office as a partner-equivalent director from Motorola, where he was senior IP counsel for north Asia.
we learn from a report in Legal Week that this is  Bird & Bird’s second hire of an Asian IP group head this year, as the firm also brought in Ai-Leen Lim as head of Asian IP and portfolio management in Hong Kong in February.

Lim joined from Singapore-based Colin Ng & Partners. Luo takes the firm’s IP partner count across Beijing and Hong Kong to five, with the group comprising 17 lawyers in total.

At Motorola Luo was in charge of IP enforcement and litigation in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. His practice focuses on all types of contentious and non-contentious IP work.

He is also vice chairman of an industry-based committee focusing on anti-counterfeiting developments in China, called the Quality Brands Protection Committee (QBPC).