KING & WOOD MALLESONS: A HISTORY

King & Wood Mallesons is a top-tier, Asia-based, international law firm that is at the forefront of the legal profession.

More than 3,000 King & Wood Mallesons lawyers perform key roles for clients across a wide range of industries, contributing to the development and transformation of an immense array of businesses and societies around the globe.

The firm has roots in Australia that go back almost 200 years and span the entire continent. This history unearths those roots, telling the individual stories of the ancestral Australian firms and that of the modern firm that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. It tracks the deep involvement of these firms in their communities, recounting the lives of their lawyers and staff, and their work for clients across numerous industries. It chronicles their actions through the great upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their involvement in seminal moments of Australian history.

Drawing on private archives and interviews, this is a history of partnerships and people, of business and corporations, of a profession and the law, of a nascent country and a changing world. Most of all, it is the story of the ambition and spirit that continues to inform the modern firm of King & Wood Mallesons.