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As new offices go, Steptoe & Johnson could hardly have picked a more perfect storm in which to launch its operations in Hong Kong. Since opening earlier this year, the office has already had to grapple with citywide protests, a pandemic outbreak, and moves in quick succession—first from Beijing, then the White House—that have both been billed as death knells for the city.

In late May, Beijing announced a new controversial national security law for Hong Kong. A few days later, President Donald Trump responded by announcing that he will begin to revoke Hong Kong's special treatment under U.S. law.

"That was a very interesting few days, to say the least," said Wendy Wysong, managing partner of Steptoe's new Hong Kong office.

As Wysong sat in Steptoe's sleek new office with panoramic views of Hong Kong Harbor, one would hardly believe that the firm opened in Hong Kong during possibly the city's worst-ever political turmoil and economic recession. The dire state of some law firms in the city makes Steptoe's decision to enter Hong Kong now all the more curious. But, what convinced the firm to move to the city was something it believes will define Hong Kong's long-term prospects, both for law firms and for businesses themselves.

"The rhetoric of decoupling between China and the U.S.—Hong Kong is right at the center of this," she said.

In his announcement regarding Hong Kong's status, Trump cited export controls as one area in which the city will be treated more similarly to the rest of China. But even before the recent controversy surrounding the national security law, the Trump administration was tightening export controls on Hong Kong that centered on sensitive U.S. technology.

"We are seeing a real uptick in U.S. export controls and sanctions matters this year," said Shaun Wu, Hong Kong-based head of investigations and white-collar defense and of international litigation for Greater China at Paul Hastings. Businesses are facing greater licensing restrictions and due diligence obligations as the Trump administration ramps up its scrutiny of technology supply chains involving U.S. suppliers and Chinese customers, often with Hong Kong intermediaries.

What Steptoe sees is a gaping hole in the Hong Kong market. There are very few lawyers with significant U.S. export controls and sanctions expertise in Hong Kong, says Sam Kenworthy, a Hong Kong-based legal recruiter at Hughes-Castell. Most U.S. trade experts are based in Washington, D.C., where the regulatory agencies are based, while those in Hong Kong tend to be in U.S. litigation boutiques or doing export controls and sanctions work on the side.

"In Hong Kong and the PRC, trade sanctions and export controls expertise is a highly specialist skill set," said Carl Hopkins, a Hong Kong-based legal recruiter at Major, Lindsey & Africa. "It is not a self-sustaining practice in Hong Kong, so it's a luxury—not a necessity."

There are signs, however, that demand for this skill set is increasing in Hong Kong as the city's importance in the U.S.-China trade war grows. In May of last year, Hogan Lovells' Benjamin Kostrzewa, former assistant general counsel at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative during the Obama administration, moved to Hong Kong from Washington, D.C.

"I was spending so much time on airplanes traveling between Washington, D.C., and Shenzhen and Beijing and everywhere in between that I asked the firm to relocate me to Hong Kong permanently," he explained.

He is now the only full-time international trade lawyer in the firm's Hong Kong office. One of his tasks is to engage U.S. regulators on behalf of clients such as Hong Kong importers of U.S. technology. Although the pandemic has made it impossible to travel this year, he plans to spend three-quarters of his time in Hong Kong and the rest elsewhere, meeting clients around the region or representing clients back in Washington, D.C.

The specialist nature of export controls and sanctions work means that leading lawyers in this area are often former government officials. Steptoe's Wysong is another example. She served as a federal prosecutor at the Department of Justice for 15 years, followed by a three-year stint as deputy assistant secretary for export enforcement at the Department of Commerce under the George W. Bush administration.

Wysong's time in government gave her a front-row seat to the U.S. government's growing concerns about China. "There were Chinese, Hong Kong, and Singaporean companies that just didn't understand that the U.S. was going to assert its extraterritorial enforcement on them," she said.

After leaving Washington, D.C., about a decade ago, Wysong moved to Hong Kong to do U.S. anti-corruption work for Clifford Chance, a move typical of the time. U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) work soon became the bread-and-butter of many U.S. white-collar defense lawyers in Hong Kong, and they had access to a steady stream of clients on the back of the 2008 financial crisis.

But anti-corruption work became increasingly hard to come by. Local firms became more competent at handling FCPA cases, while local businesses improved their compliance with anti-corruption laws, in part due to the fanfare generated by President Xi Jinping's signature anti-corruption campaign, which commenced soon after he came to power in 2012.

As a result, that cohort of U.S. regulatory compliance lawyers who moved to Asia around the early 2010s began to develop other areas of focus: namely, export controls and sanctions. For Wysong, the key inflection point was the ZTE case. In 2017, the Chinese telecom giant was fined $1.19 billion, the largest ever levied by the U.S. government in an export control case, for violations of U.S. trade sanctions on Iran and North Korea. Wysong represented ZTE during the five-year multi-agency investigation.

"The ZTE case signaled that the U.S. government was willing to take that step of targeting a major Chinese company, albeit not a SOE (state-owned enterprise), but still significant enough that it would have political repercussions," said Ali Burney, another partner at Steptoe's new Hong Kong office.

A former Beltway insider himself, Burney worked at the Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control before joining Wysong at Clifford Chance in 2007. He then made the move with her to Steptoe late last year, relocating from Singapore. There were already signs of export controls and sanctions being used as a foreign policy tool during the Obama administration, he says, but the Trump administration significantly ramped them up, especially those targeting China.

"Reading the tea leaves, you could predict that there was going to be enforcement and friction in this area between U.S. and China," he said. "That's what made us think our services would be required here in Hong Kong—this place caught between the two."

The U.S.-China trade relationship has fundamentally changed, says Hogan Lovells' Kostrzewa. He does not anticipate leaving Hong Kong anytime soon, even if there is a change in the U.S. administration come November.

"No matter who is working with China [post-election], they're going to look at export controls and sanctions as one of the tools to combat Chinese industrial policies that the U.S. takes exception to," he said.

Wysong agrees. She does not foresee the U.S. government rolling back export control measures and sanctions against China regardless of who is in office next year—only refinement or entrenchment. Although her plans to visit clients have also been disrupted by the pandemic, it is another point in Hong Kong's favor that the city provides convenient access to China and other parts of Asia where her clients are based.

"We're in Hong Kong for the long term. We're very excited about the practice that we've established here," she said.