Sunshine Law Firm is a PRC law firm with extensive experience providing energy, environment, and infrastructure-related legal services in China and abroad. Founded in 1995, we serve our clients from four offices in Hangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. We aspire to become a world-class law firm with utmost professionalism and unrivalled mastery of what we do. For 27 years, We are responsive to our clients' needs, diligent in what we do and work sincerely as one team in our full spectrum of services supporting the development, construction, investment and financing, merger and acquisition, and operation and maintenance of numerous energy, resources, and environment-related projects.
We proudly serve our clients across China and in more than 70 other jurisdictions in Europe, the Americas, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Our clients recognize us as “the most professional Chinese law firm in energy and environmental laws,” whereas Chambers and Partners has been constantly ranking us as a Band 1 law firm in the market for energy and natural resources services. Sunshine strives for maximizing our clients’ commercial values and minimizing their legal risks, and robustly works with government authorities, business community, financial institutions, research institutions, trade associations and other valuable partners and fellow stakeholders.
Sunshine’s dedicated lawyers and professionals provide legal services relating to energy projects, including renewable energy, oil and gas, thermal power, nuclear, hydropower, biomass, pumped-storage hydroelectric, waste-to-energy, and energy projects of other forms. The total installed capacity of the power generation projects that we have provided services to has exceeded 100 million kW by 2020, reflecting investment worth over RMB 1000 billion. Sunshine also has abundant experience in public-private partnership infrastructure projects in mining and resources, green projects addressing air, water, soil, and waste issues, harbors and ports, investment in industrial parks and other fields.
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Energy: Sunshine’s dedicated lawyers and professionals provide legal services relating to energy projects. We have served many clients in the traditional fossil fuel-fired power sector for a long time. In addition, Sunshine has also expanded our practice to other categories of energy projects, including oil and gas, wind and solar, nuclear, hydropower, pumped-storage hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass, waste-to-energy, and etc. We support both development of or investment in new projects, as well as operations and maintenance of existing projects. By 2018, the total installed capacity of the power generation projects that we have provided services to has exceeded 100 million kW, reflecting investment worth over RMB 900 billion. In addition, we also serve clients in certain niche and cutting-edge areas, such as integrated energy development.
Environment: Sunshine has a robust environment and resources practice that covers environment, health, and safety (“EHS”) services in the compliance advisory counseling, dispute resolution, and transactional support contexts. We advise corporate clients on ways to mitigate EHS-related legal risks in their daily operations, including assisting with the setup of EHS management systems and supporting compliance training and audits. We provide solution-oriented advice for resolving environment disputes in a variety of forms, including settlement negotiation, administrative litigation, tort litigation, and environment public interest litigation. We also advise clients on EHS-related risks in proposed M&A deals and other forms of commercial transactions. Our EHS clients are from a variety of sectors, including environmental services, conventional and renewable energy, mining, chemical manufacturing, paint manufacturing, cable manufacturing, textile, entertainment, real estate development, and etc. Our EHS team also collaborates with other teams to respond to clients’ broader interdisciplinary concerns, such as carbon asset management, green electricity certificates, environmental information disclosure, responsible investment, and other corporate sustainability and social responsibility issues.
Infrastructure: Sunshine also has an established infrastructure and project development practice. Besides our highly reputed full-cycle services for energy projects, Sunshine has abundant experience in non-energy infrastructure projects (including public-private partnership projects) such as mining and resources, environmental services (e.g., wastewater treatment plants and hazardous waste treatment centers), harbors, ports, and other transportation infrastructure, and industrial parks. Our experience covers both projects in China and overseas. We are well-versed in all kinds of issues, such as project design and feasibility studies, governmental approvals and filings, project bidding and tendering, financing, project coordination under the engineering, procurement, and construction (“EPC”) arrangement, tax, and project operations and maintenance (“O&M”) compliance. With expertise in both project investment and construction, we have extensive experience in project execution and dispute resolution.
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One significantly unique part of Sunshine is our Environmental, Resources and Energy Research Center (the “ERE Center”), which meets the growing demand for legal research in the transformation of energy and environmental issues and services. The ERE Center has launched research projects on frontline issues of importance to sustainable development, energy policy, energy and environmental strategy and climate change in China. The ERE Center has built close cooperative relations with domestic and international universities, research institutes and consulting firms to better serve our clients. The ERE Center also provides legislative consultation to government bodies, and assists energy companies in forming growth strategies.