Andrew White is a senior foreign attorney at Kim & Chang. His practice focuses on international disputes and commercial transactions involving business and investment interests in Korea, North America, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Middle East. 

Throughout his nearly 40-year career, Mr. White has been actively involved in a broad range of cross-border business transactions and international disputes in Korea, South East Asia, North America, Europe and the Middle East. Beginning in the early 1980s, he specialized his law practice in construction transactions and arbitration, and he was a co-author of a leading American treatise and digest of construction and design law. In more recent years, he broadened his expertise to include commercial interests between the US, Asia, and the Middle East. This includes a unique expertise in Islamic law, finance, and insurance (takāful), and he has co-authored leading textbooks in these subjects, as well. 

Mr. White has been a frequent advisor to government entities (particularly banking and finance regulators, as well as the judiciary) in South East Asia, South Asia, and the US; he advised the US Department of State / USAID as a consultant on commercial law reform and legal capacity building projects in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and East Africa; and he acted as an advisor to the Ministry of Trade of Bosnia and Herzegovina and a consortium of Bosnian business and industry in connection with commercial matters arising from implementation of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (the 1995 Dayton Accords). 

Mr. White is a Fellow of the Singapore Institute of Arbitrators (SIArb, Publications & Website Committee), and he also holds an appointment to the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC-Paris) Task Force on Financial Institutions and International Arbitration. As a professional arbitrator, he has arbitrated extensively through the American Arbitration Association, and holds an appointment to the Singapore International Arbitration Centre, as well as the Asian International Arbitration Centre (Islamic i-Arbitration Rules Revision Committee). He was formerly an Adjudicator in Singapore’s Financial Industry Disputes Resolution Centre (FIDReC). He also was trained and appointed in the US as a Court-Certified Mediator in 1992 and in 2018, he completed the Singapore International Mediation Centre Specialist Mediator training program, as part of the first group in Korea to be trained by SIMC. In addition, he was formerly a Managing Editor of the Asia Pacific Mediation Journal. 

Prior to joining Kim & Chang, he was the co-head of International Dispute Resolution Practice for a major Korean law firm; head of a practice group for a London-based firm, with a particular focus on cross-border finance/investment and insurance matters involving parties and investments in London, the Middle East, Singapore and Malaysia.; a partner and manager of a regional office for a US-based international law firm; and a partner in a law firm in Germany and the US. 

From 2005 until 2015, Mr. White was also a professor in Singapore Management University; a Senior Fellow in the University of Melbourne; and a visiting professor in Gadjah Mada University (Yogyakarta, Indonesia), Universitas Islam Indonesia, and the International Islamic University of Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur). 

He also lectures extensively on legal and risk mitigation issues for Korean companies doing business in multicultural cross-border environments, including lectures provided through the Sungkyunkwan University, the Korean Institute of Economic Policy (KIEP), the Korea Plant Industries Association, the Korea Professional Infrastructure Developers Association, and as an adjunct professor in the Korea University School of Business. 

In 2019 and again in 2020, Mr. White was awarded an “In-House Community Commended External Counsel of the Year” award at the Asia-Pacific In-House Community Awards ceremony in Hong Kong (“Andrew White knows what a client needs and provides more than is requested”). Drawing from his unique practice and academic experience in cross-cultural negotiation, dispute resolution, finance, and risk mitigation, Mr. White has been a frequent lecturer at professional conferences and seminars throughout Asia and the Middle East, together with television and radio commentaries on the BBC, Channel NewsAsia, and other media. In addition, he has been published widely in various magazines, newspapers, and professional journals in Asia, the US, and the Middle East, as well as books published by Oxford University Press, Wiley & Sons (Wiley Finance Series), and McGraw-Hill. Most recently, he published an article on “Early Resolution of Disputes in Korea: Negotiation, Mediation, and Multi-Tiered Dispute Resolution” in the Dispute Resolution Journal Vol 72 No1 (2017); and a review of the GAR Guide to Construction Arbitration in The International Construction Law Review (2019). 

Mr. White obtained his Bachelors of Science degree in 1977 (Guilford College), his Juris Doctor in 1982 (Case W. Reserve University), and his LL.M. degree in 2007 (University of Melbourne). He passed the Bar Examinations and has been admitted to the US State Bars of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Colorado, as well as the United States District (trial courts) and United States Circuit Courts of Appeals in those States. Since 1992, he also has been admitted and has appeared as counsel before the United States Supreme Court.