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. In New York, its presence extends to more than 40 lawyers through a collaboration with Bochner, a law firm with locations across the US and a representative office in London.
Key leadership appointments include Lukas Kratochvil, office managing partner for Tokyo and head of legal practice Asia, and Ai-Jo Wu, who 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.
“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. We wanted to start from that premise rather than retrofit it onto a legacy partnership,” he told Asia Business Law Journal.
“The timing follows this push-and-pull factor reaching a point where it can materially change how legal, advisory and investment work gets done, provided it sits inside the right infrastructure and under proper professional supervision. We took the view that firms designed for this from day one, owning their data and building their own tooling rather than renting it, would hold a durable advantage. Rather than wait for the market to settle, we chose to build the firm now and shape that shift instead of reacting to it later.”
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.
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.
“Both were deliberate. Singapore is our 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,” he said.
“Japan reflects both the strength of our team there – led by Takashi Toyokawa on the investment banking side and Lukas Kratochvil [on] the legal team. The sheer volume of inbound and outbound cross-border M&A activity involving Japanese corporates is where our model adds real value. Together they give us complementary coverage of a developed market and a regional hub.”
Wolter said there were plans to further expand Novara’s presence in the Asia-Pacific region, with one more location already in mind.
“We have at least one other hub in mind that will be announced at a later stage. Beyond that, we would consider expansion where local partnerships cannot sufficiently cover the work, or where our existing clients simply require us to be on the ground,” he said.
Just like in New York, Wolter said there were also plans to grow Novara 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,” he said.
“Our model is deliberately not to plant a full-scale office in every jurisdiction. Where we are not building out a full local office, we partner with leading firms on the ground and act as the project manager co-ordinating the mandate, which enables us to cover far more ground than our own headcount would suggest. In APAC, Singapore and Tokyo are the offices we expect to grow significantly, and we will scale the team to the work rather than ahead of it.”
In its first year, Wolter said the firm would prioritise building depth across its service offerings.
“In the first year the priority is depth rather than breadth: proving the model across live mandates in our different service lines, embedding our own AI infrastructure and client-facing tooling, and building a track record in the offices we have opened,” he said.
Providing a longer-term outlook, he said the firm aimed to differentiate itself from its competitors.
“The ambition is for Novara 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,” he said.
