Freshfields is to relaunch in Singapore in the coming weeks, more than five years after the firm closed its former office in the Southeast Asian city-state.

The magic circle firm has signed a lease on a new 8,000 sq ft office in Singapore's Ocean Financial Centre. Leading the new venture will be partner Stephen Revell, who oversees Freshfields' global capital markets practice, and who will relocate from Hong Kong.

He will work alongside Gavin MacLaren, who heads up the firm's Asian energy and natural resources practice, while Lucy Reed, the global head of Freshfield's international arbitration group, has also been appointed to spearhead its arbitration practice in the country.

MacLaren joined the firm from Allens Arthur Robinson's Melbourne base in April this year, while Reed relocated from Freshfields' New York office to Hong Kong this May.

The new office will focus on corporate, arbitration and finance work. 

Robert Ashworth, Freshfields Asia managing partner, told Legal Week: "We have a licence there, and we expect to be fully operational in a couple of weeks' time."

"We've taken the lease; we're still in the process of fitting it out. Singapore has always been and continues to be a location for servicing all of Southeast Asia.

"In 2006 we made a decision that we would move our capabilities to Hong Kong… partly because financial conditions weren't great, and there wasn't the perceived client demand at the time. Since then, having canvassed our clients fairly extensively about whether they would prefer that we had an office back in Singapore, we decided to reopen.

"In the last few years certainly there has been a great deal of activity, and in large part driven by places like Indonesia which has vast supplies of natural gas and other resources."

Major roles the firm has taken in recent years have included advising Hutchison Port Holdings on its $5.4bn (£3.4bn) initial public offering last year, Singapore's largest-ever.

The office will initially be staffed with up to 10 employees, Ashworth added, but could reach up to 40 in future, depending on client demand. The number of staff at any one time will include lawyers who are physically based in the Singapore office, as well as those who will work there on an ad hoc basis.

The launch comes after Freshfields closed the door on its former two-partner Singapore branch in April 2007, as part of a move to refocus its Asia efforts on China and Japan.

The closure of the base, which saw partners Bruce Cooper and Yeelong Tan relocate to Hong Kong, came shortly after the termination of the firm's operations in Bangkok in 2004.

The office had previously operated as a joint venture with local practice Drew & Napier, but this was dissolved along with the Singapore closure.