How it started
History
Johnson Stokes & Master was established in 1863 in Hong Kong by Edmund Sharp as a sole proprietorship at a time when Hong Kong had less than a dozen practising lawyers. In 1890, the firm changed its name to Johnson, Stokes and Master, from Edmund Sharp & Toller. In 1893, an office was established in Shanghai, China.
In 1895, Alfred Bulmer Johnson became senior partner of the firm with Alfred Stokes and Godfrey Cornewall Chester Master as supporting partners. At that time, JSM was
already legal advisor to the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, a major commercial establishment in Hong Kong.
On December 1, 1896, Johnson retired from private practice at the firm and also resigned his position of Crown Solicitor, which he had held from 1882. On this occasion, the succession of the Crown Solicitorship was passed not to the firm's next in command — Stokes, who was in Shanghai running the local branch of the firm — but to the next most senior solicitor in the Colony, Henry Lardner Dennys.
In July 1897, JSM engaged the firm's first local born Chinese solicitor — the Oxford-educated Wei Wah-on, son of a compradore of the Chartered Mercantile Bank.
From Wikipedia’s article on Johnson Stokes & Master, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2