Firm History

With offices in San Francisco, Shanghai, and Taipei, Wang & Wang serves clients with business assets around the globe.  Our firm is well-known for intellectual property protection and enforcement programs in China and Taiwan, where we conduct registration and anti-infringement actions for major corporations and law firms.  At Wang & Wang, not only are we proud of the legal practice that we are today, we are also proud of our origins; and we are pleased to share the history of our firm.

Kenneth C. Wang received his LL.B. from Soochow University's Dongwu Law School (now named the Kenneth Wang School of Law in his honor).  After joining the China bar in 1938, Kenneth became a partner at the Ping Kung Law Firm, a leading firm in Shanghai before the revolution.  Ping Kung specialized in international commercial transactions in Shanghai, and its partners were fluent in English, French, and German.  During the period of 1941 to 1950, he also served as professor of law at Aurora, Soochow, and Kwang-Hwa Universities.  At the end of World War II, Kenneth was asked to join the Shanghai Court of Appeals from 1945 to 1947, where he sat as a judge on the High Court in Shanghai.  There, he reviewed many war crimes trials against Japanese soldiers.

In 1947, Dean Roscoe Pound invited Kenneth to Harvard Law School, where he was awarded a fellowship.  After earning his LL.M. degree at Harvard, he returned to China to resume his law practice and professorship at Soochow University Law School.  In 1949, when the legal profession was abolished in China, he became President of Aurora College for Women.

After the social reforms that resulted in the closing of law schools and courts, Kenneth came to the United States in the 1950s to teach law at St. John's University Law School.  During this time, he took the New York Bar exam and was admitted to practice law in New York.  In 1963, he served as Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then returned to teaching at St. John's University Law School.  In 1964, he was invited by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson to comment on China's position and role in world peace at the White House.  In addition to his teaching and law practice, he was also on the panel of arbitrators of the American Arbitration Association.

While a senior faculty member at St. John's Law School, Kenneth trained many future governors, judges, and lawyers in New York.  He was honored by St. John's University, first with a President's Medal in 1984, then with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in1987, and finally with a Medal of Honor in 1992.  In 1987, Kenneth joined his son Francis in the international law practice of Wang & Wang.  In the same year, he was admitted to the Taiwan Bar Association, and he managed Wang & Wang's Taiwan Office until his retirement.