Mr. Piesner is Asia Managing Partner of Morrison & Foerster and Managing Partner of the firm’s Singapore office. A highly accomplished practitioner, he heads the firm’s market-leading Asia real estate practice and practiced in the firm’s Tokyo office for 10 years.
Mr. Piesner focuses his practice on cross-border transactions, including multi-party ventures, fund formation and restructuring, real estate finance, and strategic M&A and private equity deals focused on the real estate industry. Mr. Piesner has significant experience working with all major real estate asset classes – particularly hotel/resort and industrial properties – across the region and worldwide, including work in Japan, China, India, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Brazil, and Hong Kong.
In the 2018 edition of Chambers Global, Mr. Piesner is recommended as a "Foreign expert" in Singapore as well as an "Expert based abroad" for Japan for Investment Funds. During his career in Tokyo, Mr. Piesner was consistently recognized as one of the leading U.S. real estate attorneys in Japan-Chambers Asia Pacific has ranked him six years in a row and The Asia Pacific Legal 500 has included him in its elite “Leading Lawyer” list since 2010. In Chambers Asia Pacific, clients have described Mr. Piesner as “friendly and professional…a top-level lawyer” who is “very strong – he is a business generator for the firm and we find that clients stay very loyal to him.” They have also said “he is intelligent and able to absorb a great deal of information quickly,” adding that “he's a great resource - I can call him at any time and he's got all the knowledge.”
Mr. Piesner’s representative projects include acting as counsel for:
Other representative clients Mr. Piesner has worked with include CBREI, Morgan Stanley, Prologis, RREEF, and The Carlyle Group.
Mr. Piesner received his A.B. (Phi Beta Kappa and cum laude) in East Asian Studies from Colby College in 1988 and his J.D. in 1992 and M.A. in Asian Studies in 1993 from the University of Hawaii. Mr. Piesner also was a Ph.D. student in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University before returning to the practice of law in 1997. Mr. Piesner lived in Japan for 15 years and is proficient in spoken and written Japanese.
In the 2016 edition of Chambers Global, Mr. Piesner is recommended as a "Foreign expert" in Singapore for Investment Funds as well as an "Expert based abroad" for Japan Corporate/M&A and Investment Funds. During his career in Tokyo, Mr. Piesner was consistently recognized as one of the leading U.S. real estate attorneys in Japan. Chambers Asia Pacific has ranked him six years in a row and The Asia Pacific Legal 500 has included him in its elite “Leading Lawyer” list since 2010. In Chambers Asia Pacific, clients have described Mr. Piesner as “friendly and professional…a top-level lawyer” who is “very strong – he is a business generator for the firm and we find that clients stay very loyal to him.” They have also said “he is intelligent and able to absorb a great deal of information quickly,” adding that “he's a great resource - I can call him at any time and he's got all the knowledge.”
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