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Law firms in Australia and New Zealand are meeting the onslaught of competition from professional services firms by trimming and streamlining services. The trend is towards a high-tech, highly specialized and user friendly law firm. Morgan Acker reports

UK firm Freshfields will open its seventh European office before the end of the year. The firm will open in Milan, extending its presence in southern Europe following the opening of offices in Madrid and Barcelona.

José Fernandez has joined US firm O'Melveny & Myers as partner in charge of the firm's Latin America group. He will be resident in the New York and Los Angeles offices. Fernandez comes from the New York office of Baker & McKenzie, where he gained experience in Latin American mergers, infrastructure projects, and privatization work, including as adviser to the governments of Bolivia, Peru and Uruguay.

The Central Bank of Chile has been requiring for a number of years that all loans to Chilean residents from abroad as well as most foreign equity investments be subject to the obligation to deposit with the Central Bank, on an interest-free basis, 30% of the amount involved for a period of one year or, alternatively, to pay an equivalent fee.

G L Bustin and A V Krylov of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, Brussels, look at the implications of the partnership and cooperation agreement between the EU and Russia and its impact on bilateral financial law

ROAD MANAGEMENT GROUP

In the early 1980s, Riggs National Bank of Washington DC made loans to several wholly-owned entities of Peru. These loans were renewed in 1983 under the restructuring of Peru's external debt.

From January 1 1996, the system of standard tariffs for motor vehicle liability insurance has been replaced by the latest revision of the Federal Law on the Supervision of Private Insurance Companies (Insurance Supervisory Law, ISL). This revision abolished a 20 year-old mandatory system of a single standard tariff for all motor vehicle liability insurers in Switzerland. Now, motor vehicle liability insurers are free to fix a tariff, thereby becoming a non-restricted insurance business.

Differences between US and English law have always been more apparent than real. The Gustafson decision brings the two even closer in respect of issuer liability. By Simon Gleeson of Richards Butler, London

The New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZSE) has launched a new managed fund (the TeNZ fund) which tracks the NZSE10 Index (the Index). The Index is a weighted index made up of selected securities of New Zealand's top 10 listed companies, by market capitalization, which has the principal purpose of providing a measure of price trends of those companies. The TeNZ fund is a passive fund which will own a diversified portfolio of securities in the same weightings as the Index with the aim of providing investment results that correspond to the performance of the Index. Investors will purchase units in the fund, and the units will be tradeable on the NZSE.