An initiative to promote business and legal ties between China and the UK has attracted leading City firms, its backers said this week.

The UK-China Legal Partnership Initiative (LPI), to be formally launched this month, will run annual seminars, to be held alternately at China’s Tsinghua University and the London School of Economics and Political Science, bringing together British and Chinese experts in trade, commerce and commercial law.

The first seminar will address intellectual property protection in China.

Solicitor Matthew Townsend, director of the China Britain Law Institute, the body behind the LPI, said: ‘Recent years have seen a welcome increase in Sino-UK legal co-operation and exchange. What makes this scheme different is its longevity, as well as its genuinely transnational range, placing equal weight on seminars alternately in China and the UK.’

UK firms already signed up to the LPI include Addleshaw Goddard, Clifford Chance, Clyde & Co, CMS Cameron McKenna, DLA Piper, Eversheds, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Herbert Smith Freehills, Hogan Lovells, Macfarlanes, Norton Rose, SJ Berwin and Wragge & Co.

A Law Society international division spokeswoman said that it was ‘actively supporting and promoting’ the LPI to its membership.