Twenty years of international corporate and real estate practice means our firm can act as a strategic partner from within your enterprise, so you can direct the growth of your business with confidence.
From the outside, the United States may look like one market. Yet, it is many — each with its own unwritten customs around capital and business. We know the differences that decide whether a venture succeeds in the West Coast, East Coast, or Southwest, and we calibrate your strategy to the market that is the best fit for you.
You have created a business or family office in Hong Kong that has outgrown the local market.
You may be a family office that seeks to place capital directly into American technology, healthcare, or real estate. You may be a founder whose ambition has outgrown what Hong Kong can return, and are now ready to raise in arguably the deepest capital market in the world. In either case, the building is done. What lies ahead is a system larger, more regulated, and more regionally varied than the one you have operated in until now.
Principals at this level are served best by a team positioned inside the enterprise rather than retained at its edge. The distinction is between an advisor who delivers documents and a partner who hears your thinking, evaluates it honestly, and makes it executable in America.
Every engagement begins the same way. We begin with what you actually want, not the pathway and legal structure that your peers have used, or that you have learned about in seminars.
PHASES OF WORK
Phase I — The Foundation.
In this first phase, you receive a clear and ordered map of your American entry: the entities, the regulatory terrain, the regional differences, the sequence of steps, and the questions that often go unasked until they become urgent. The map is yours to keep whether or not the relationship continues. That is by design. You will understand your own situation more completely at the end of this phase than many engagements ever provide, and you will decide whether this is the right partnership on the strength of real information rather than a sales impression.
Phase II — All In.
If you decide to proceed, the firm takes the seat of strategic partner across the whole of your American operation. The work moves through defined stages, each with a specific objective you can see and measure.
Structure and foundation. We establish the right entities, restructure any existing Hong Kong holdings to sit correctly alongside them, and build the corporate and tax architecture so it is investor and investment ready from the first day rather than rebuilt under pressure later.
Team and infrastructure. We assemble and direct the specialists your situation requires in intellectual property, tax, securities, employment, and banking, and put the operational foundation in place down to bank documents that result in underwriters approving non-U.S. companies rather than declining them.
Capital and positioning. If you raise, we test the market with the right people first, help prepare the documentation and the valuation, and assist in structuring the round so growth capital does not have to cost you control of your company.
Oversight and presence. We can hold a fiduciary seat, on your board and as an officer of your company, will monitor the regulatory and political developments that touch your holdings, and we are present, in person and in the United States, when the decisions matter.
Much of what follows, you already may sense you need. Some of it tends to surface only later. Here are some of the key roles we fill:
- Entity formation and restructuring. Restructuring your Hong Kong holdings in conjunction with Hong Kong counsel so they sit correctly alongside the American entity rather than creating complications later.
- Cross-border tax structure. Planning tax efficient structures and repatriation, so profits are taxed once on their way home rather than twice.
- Capital raising. Assistance in regulation D private placements, facilitating private placement memoranda, and creating transparent capitalizatation stacks that hold up under an investor's examination.
- Investor readiness. Intellectual property assignments that survive due diligence, and foreign investment review exposure assessed before a term sheet rather than after one.
- Fiduciary roles. Corporate Director and Corporate Secretary services - a trusted officer within your company rather than an advisor observing from outside.
- Ongoing intelligence. Continuous monitoring of the regulatory and political developments that genuinely touch your holdings, so your decisions rest on what is real rather than on what is reported.
Behind every item on that list stands a network built over many years - specialists in international tax, intellectual property, securities, employment, valuation, and banking, each one vetted and each one directed by the firm. We select the right specialist, scope the work to precisely what your situation requires, brief them with the full context of your business, and return their work to you as a single decision you can act on. You hold one relationship and one point of accountability, with the right expert already in place for every question and the connections among them managed on your behalf.
David Austin Law is a corporate and real estate practice built specifically for Hong Kong businesses and families entering the United States. The firm's principal, David Austin, holds twenty years of practice and bar admissions in Texas and Hawaii.
What lies behind our firm is less common. Before the law, David Austin worked in public equities markets and in information technology, which is why the firm can sit across from a technical founder, understand what the technology actually does, and render it in terms an investor will fund. The firm has syndicated its own transactions and placed its own capital at risk, so the perspective here is that of an operator rather than an observer. The firm has spent years in Hong Kong and across Asia, enough to understand the market you come from rather than to study it from a distance. And David Austin Law is built to run on continuous intelligence, so your counsel reads the American market daily rather than quarterly, and reports what genuinely bears on your holdings.
The practice is deliberately small. A limited number of clients at any time, direct contact with the principal rather than an associate, and the attention that only a short roster makes possible.
Growth should not require surrendering control of your company.
Capital is available from individual investors who support your vision without taking your business, when the raise is positioned correctly. The familiar assumption that meaningful growth demands handing over half the company reflects the interests of those who benefit from that arrangement, not a law of the market.
The relationship is the work, not the documents.
Documents are the smallest part of what we do. The value is a partnership measured in years, supported by a network built to serve your growth over time rather than to close a single transaction.
A principal deserves to be heard in full.
Your judgment is real, and your thinking deserves to be evaluated and built upon rather than received and filed. The work begins with understanding what you actually want, and everything that follows proceeds from there.
The standard is high because it is held for a few.
We take a limited number of clients because the attention we believe in cannot be delivered at scale. That is a deliberate choice about how the firm practices, and it is the reason the few we serve receive what they do.
Every enterprise is singular, and it is treated that way.
There is no template here. You work directly with the principal, on a situation understood as specifically yours, with the full context of your enterprise held by the person actually advising you.
