Peter & Kim

Only in its fourth year of business, the boutique has been handling cases worth billions for Korea and Iran’s national oil company

Peter & Kim was launched in 2020 by two prominent international arbitration lawyers – Wolfgang Peter of Switzerland and South Korea’s Kap-You (Kevin) Kim – as a Euro-Asian boutique exclusively dedicated to arbitration and arbitration-related litigation. 

Peter, based in Geneva, is a leading counsel and arbitrator who co-founded the Swiss firm now known as Python in the 1980s. He worked there for 34 years before breaking away in 2015 to launch his own firm, Peter & Partners.  
Kim spent more than two decades at Bae Kim & Lee (BKL) in Seoul and co-founded its arbitration practice. He is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field in Korea. As well as holding positions at the Korean Commercial Arbitration Board (KCAB) and ICC Korea, he is a former vice president of the ICC Court and former secretary general of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration.

Peter brought his entire team over from Peter & Partners, including partner Konstantin Christie and of counsel Julia Xoudis in Geneva. Former ICC Court president Pierre Tercier also joined that office in 2021 as senior counsel.  
The Seoul office expanded in 2021 with the hire of BKL’s former arbitration practice leader John Bang, and former KCAB president Ho Won Lee. 

The Sydney office is headed by partner James Morrison, another former BKL lawyer. There is also a Singapore office led by Charis Tan, a former Eversheds lawyer with experience in investor-state disputes and public international law. 
The firm has expanded rapidly over the past three years, with the headcount of its Asia offices nearly doubling. It now has more than 40 practitioners across five offices. It has also quickly broken into the GAR 30 ranking.

Network

The main offices are in Geneva, Seoul, Sydney and Singapore. It also has a presence in Bern, where construction-focused of counsel Jürg Künzle is based. The firm plans to open an office in Zurich in 2024.

Who uses it?

Prominent clients include the National lranian Oil Company (NIOC) and US nuclear power company Westinghouse Electric.

The government of South Korea uses the firm. Other clients in Korea include POSCO Engineering & Construction, Mirae Asset Global Investments and the local branch of Standard Chartered Bank. 

Track record

Peter has been acting for NIOC in a multibillion-dollar dispute with the Israeli government over an abandoned oil pipeline venture. The sensitive case has spawned at least three arbitrations and various French and Swiss court actions over more than two decades.

As part of that dispute, Peter and his team helped NIOC secure a US$1.1 billion award in 2015 against an Israeli state-owned entity in compensation for oil shipments pre-dating the Iranian revolution of 1979. They later saw off a challenge to the award in the Swiss courts.

They have also acted for major European energy conglomerates in several gas price reviews worth more than €1 billion.
The firm has helped the South Korean city of Incheon defeat a US$53 million ICC claim brought by a consortium including German-Swiss hotel group Kempinski. 

Recent events

Peter & Kim helped South Korea defeat the bulk of a high-profile ICSID claim worth roughly US$5 billion brought by US private equity group Lone Star. The state was ordered to pay US$217 million plus interest, less than 5% of what was claimed in the decade-long case. The firm was part of a co-counsel team with BKL and Arnold & Porter. Korea is now seeking annulment of the award.

For POSCO, the firm secured the complete dismissal of a US$2.5 billion claim brought by joint venture partner Gale. The dispute concerned a US$40 billion project to build a “smart city” on reclaimed land outside Seoul. The firm worked alongside BKL and Clifford Chance.

Peter was senior lead counsel to NIOC in a US$32 billion arbitration brought by the UAE’s Crescent Petroleum over a terminated gas supply deal. However, he and his entire team dramatically resigned two weeks before the final hearing – citing due process concerns over the tribunal’s refusal to reschedule a hearing despite Peter’s unavailability.

A NIOC subsidiary, Malaysian-registered Naftiran Intertrade Company, has meanwhile retained the firm to bring an ICSID claim against Bahrain.

Westinghouse Electric is using the firm for a KCAB dispute with the state-owned Korea Electric Power Corporation over rights to nuclear reactor technology. Peter & Kim is working with K&L Gates on that case.

It is acting for Mirae Asset Global Investments and Standard Chartered Bank Korea in a new SIAC case concerning a deal to acquire a landmark development in Seoul’s financial district for nearly US$2.8 billion. Yulchon and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan are working with the firm on that matter.

The firm is lead counsel to a Singaporean businessman in a US$15 billion treaty claim against China over real estate investments expropriated while he was under house arrest.

Sports and entertainment disputes practitioner Alexis Schoeb joined as partner based in Sydney and Geneva. 
The Seoul office hired Canadian senior counsel Hyun Kim, who previously founded Clifford Chance’s office in the city. Flavio Peter was promoted to partner in Geneva.

Partner Christoph Brunner in Bern, who was part of the team that joined with Wolfgang Peter in 2020, left in 2022 to set up his own boutique in the city.

Client comment

Alexander Krefft of Triple P Capital, which used Peter & Kim in a SIAC case over a failed M&A, says the firm is “fast, responsive and incredibly commercially minded” with a “true focus on the business goals a client wants to achieve, which is rare”. Morrison and Tan possess “deep technical international arbitration expertise”.

Another client says Bang is the “premier practitioner” in Korea, who provides “elite oral advocacy”. Partner Yunsoo Shin is also a “top-notch advocate that will be one to watch in the coming years”.