Novara, a newly established global law firm, has officially launched with offices in Singapore, Tokyo, London, and New York.
The firm is led by global managing partner Marcus Wolter, who previously worked at Freshfields and Caldwell, and comprises a core team of 11 senior partners and associates.
Lukas Kratochvil is the office managing partner for Tokyo and head of legal practice Asia, and Ai-Jo Wu leads the Singapore office.
An office managing partner for New York will be announced later this year.
Wolter said the launch of Novara was driven by growing client demand for more efficient and integrated services amid an increasingly globalised and volatile economic environment.
Wolter stated that Novara was built around a straightforward conviction: the way professional services are delivered is being reshaped by AI, and the incumbent model of leveraged headcount billed by the hour is not the model that will win the next decade.
They wanted to start from that premise rather than retrofit it onto a legacy partnership.
Officially launched on 4 July 2026, Novara is structured around three pillars: investment banking, corporate legal services, and strategy advisory.
Its core practice areas include corporate and commercial, corporate transactions, structured financing and lending, counsel-as-a-service, funds, IP, and regulatory services.
Wolter said the decision to establish offices in Singapore and Japan was a deliberate strategic move as the former provided the perfect base for cross-border work across Asean and beyond, while the latter had seen a notable uptick in inbound and outbound cross-border M&A activity.
Singapore is Novara’s home base and a natural hub for cross-border work across Asean and beyond, with a strong regulatory framework for fund management and a deep pool of international talent, which suits an integrated law, banking and strategy platform.
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They have at least one other hub in mind that will be announced at a later stage.
Novara will consider expansion where local partnerships cannot sufficiently cover the work, or where its existing clients simply require it to be on the ground.
Just like in New York, Novara also plans to grow through partnerships with other law firms.
Additional hires are locked in and will be announced over the coming months, as with additional partnerships with other law firms.
Novara’s model is deliberately not to plant a full-scale office in every jurisdiction.
Where Novara is not building out a full local office, it partners with leading firms on the ground and acts as the project manager co-ordinating the mandate, which enables it to cover far more ground than its own headcount would suggest.
In its first year, Novara will prioritise building depth across its service offerings.
Novara aims to be recognised as a genuinely AI-native professional services firm operating at international standards across law, investment banking and asset management, with an integrated offering that a conventional single-discipline firm cannot easily replicate.
As a newcomer to the global law firm scene, Novara is entering a market that is increasingly demanding more efficient and integrated services, and it will be interesting to see how the firm’s AI-native approach will shape its growth and development in the years to come, particularly in areas like energy supply.
In the first year the priority is depth rather than breadth: proving the model across live mandates in different service lines, embedding its own AI infrastructure and client-facing tooling, and building a track record in the offices it has opened.
