CKR Law, which touts a global presence but has had trouble paying its partners, said Thursday that it is in negotiations with China’s Yingke Law Firm to create a new U.S. firm.

In an announcement on its website, CKR said it had struck a tentative deal to create an entity called YKR Law that would be owned by Yingke and some CKR partners. It said the proposed firm would operate in as many as 10 U.S. cities and concentrate on the U.S. market but “benefit from the global network of Yingke and CKR.”

The announcement leaves many unanswered questions, including whether CKR, which currently lists 20 locations in the U.S., will continue to exist.

Jeffrey Rinde, CKR’s managing partner, wasn’t available for comment Thursday.

A partner at CKR who spoke on the condition of anonymity said details of the deal were still being worked out, but compared the arrangement to the 2015 merger of Dentons and Dacheng in that a U.S. firm and a Chinese firm were partnering together. The announcement said due diligence was ongoing, and a decision of whether to create a new firm was expected by the end of September.

The move comes after months of turbulence within CKR and significant attrition within its ranks. ALM reported in May that the firm’s leaders acknowledged a cash “crunch”—blamed first on the bank, then on insufficient billing and collections—resulted in many partners not being paid their promised draws.

Some former partners are still owed money, sources have told ALM. Rinde, CKR’s managing partner, has previously said the firm “intends to honor its commitments to [performing] partners with respect to their past-due draws.”

More than 200 lawyers were listed on CKR’s website in May; now, just 138 people with a CKR Law email address are listed there, some of whom are primarily affiliated with other law firms. Nearly all of the 11 lawyers listed on the firm’s website in Cincinnati, for example, work for immigration-focused Hammond Law Group, whose partner Michael Hammond says his firm’s relationship with CKR is referrals-based and doesn’t entail money changing hands between the two firms.

But if the deal goes through in some form, even with CKR’s diminished footprint, it could give Yingke a key foothold in the U.S. Yingke says on its website that it has more than 8,000 lawyers around the world; 7,850 of them are in China, according to the announcement by CKR. Yingke’s website lists only one attorney in the U.S.

The announcement about the partnership said the proposed new entity, YKR Law, will operate as an “independent legal entity separate from Yingke Law Firm and CKR but will work closely with Yingke Law Firm as a key member of Yingke Global, an alliance of international law firms.”

The new law firm, the announcement said, “will focus on the U.S. domestic market and at the same time, the parties believe the firm will benefit from the global network of Yingke and CKR.”

Yingke was founded in 2001 and its business model has evolved as its head count and revenue have soared. Previously, lawyers there practiced independently and remitted 5% to 10% of their collections to the firm, but since 2013, partners have bought equity and shared in the profits. As of 2016, however, its offices operated independently and shared profits only within each office, according to an ALM article at the time.

The one Yingke contact listed in the U.S., Jesse J. Weiner, is a member of the New York bar, but his address in the New York state attorney directory is at a Yingke office in China. He said in an email that he could not immediately comment about the deal.