International law firm Steptoe & Johnson has announced the new opening of its Beijing, China office.

Steptoe advises companies doing business in and from China on a wide range of matters, including international trade, market access, export control, antitrust, and compliance with U.S. and European environmental, product safety, and other regulations. The Beijing office will help Steptoe expand its work in these areas and better serve its clients, the company said.

The firm’s International Trade and Investment practice helps companies seeking to enter and expand their business in the Chinese market. The firm currently advises the Government of China on matters before the World Trade Organization. Led by Edward Krauland, the firm’s International Regulation and Compliance practice advises clients on sensitive regulatory issues, including U.S. and European export control rules.

Steptoe also maintains an internationally recognized anti-corruption practice under the direction of Lucinda Low and Patrick Norton, who counsel clients subject to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and various anti-corruption laws around the world including throughout Asia. The practice also represents clients in internal investigations, enforcement actions, and collateral proceedings, including before the World Bank and other institutions.

Serving as managing partner of the Beijing office is Eric Emerson, a partner in Steptoe’s International Trade and Investment practice. Emerson has been with Steptoe for 18 years and advises companies on all types of international trade issues, including U.S. trade litigation and access to U.S. markets.

Joining Emerson in the China practice is Susan Munro, a new partner who recently joined Steptoe from the Shanghai office of a major international law firm. Munro has spent more than ten years advising financial institutions, multinational companies, and investment funds on business and investment issues. Her experience includes advising clients on market entry and exit strategies, acquisitions, and regulatory matters. She also has conducted numerous FCPA and earnings management investigations and represented clients in arbitrations and cross-border litigation. Munro is a solicitor qualified in England & Wales and is a non-practicing barrister called to the Bar of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China.

Another key member of the firm’s China practice is Ying Huang, who has spent seven years as a Foreign Legal Consultant in Steptoe’s Washington, D.C. office, and has played an important role in the firm’s market access initiatives.

Wolters Kluwer, through its Financial & Compliance Services division, has announced the creation of a new business unit, ARC Logics, to help organizations across multiple industries address increasingly complex audit, risk, and compliance challenges.

ARC Logics offers a broad suite of software and services that enable organizations to rapidly address evolving risk issues, and brings together Wolters Kluwer’s audit, risk, and compliance brands including:

• CCH TeamMate, which provides an integrated, paperless system for improving every aspect of the audit process, including risk assessment, scheduling, planning, execution, review, report generation, trend analysis, committee reporting, and storage;
• Sword, which enables organizations to measure, monitor, and manage compliance and risk across their business; and
• Axentis, which helps organizations in highly regulated industries minimize exposure to compliance and risk, and to optimize business performance.

ARC Logics’ suite-based approach combines the advantages of solution-specific software platforms and enterprise integration. ARC Logics can help specific departments within an organization—legal, compliance, risk, finance, and audit areas—meet their unique needs with a suite offering while concurrently building a holistic, enterprise-wide program. This enables organizations to quickly fulfill their immediate objectives in a targeted and cost-effective manner, while building for the future on a common platform.

As a Wolters Kluwer business, ARC Logics also leverages deep, global domain expertise and proprietary content from the organization to help customers across multiple industries understand, manage, and control risk.

Leading this new unit is Ian Rhind, president of ARC Logics. Rhind previously served as president and CEO of CCH Canadian, a Wolters Kluwer business.

Business Propulsion Systems and Resolver announced that they have merged to form BPS Resolver, effective as of Jan. 1. The merged company will be based in Toronto, Canada.

This merger brings together two governance, risk, and compliance software product offerings. The new company’s combined offering will provide a complete product suite of planning, execution, and refinement solutions for GRC and sustainability best practices. Together, they will focus on rapid delivery of software-as-a-service compliance solutions, as well as large-scale more customized enterprise licensed solutions, to utilities, financial institutions, and healthcare markets worldwide. The merged company’s increased scale and combined expertise aims to enhance, accelerate, and strengthen its responsiveness to client software requirements and service needs.

EMC Corporation, a global provider of information infrastructure solutions, has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Archer Technologies, a privately-held provider of governance, risk, and compliance software.

The combination of Archer with EMC’s RSA Security Division will significantly extend EMC’s powerful solutions portfolio for visualizing and managing risk, enabling customers to automate GRC visibility and policy enforcement across both physical and virtualized IT environments.

“Traditional security management focuses primarily on addressing technology issues, but our customers are telling us that their real challenges are in the areas of policy management, audit and compliance,” said Art Coviello, President of EMC’s RSA Security Division. “The Archer solution not only offers the visibility into risk and compliance that customers need, it brings stronger policy management capabilities to the RSA portfolio. The end result is customers are able to better manage their security programs and prove compliance across both physical and virtual infrastructures, and effectively communicate to the business.”

Archer’s technology, coupled with RSA’s solutions for data loss prevention and security information and event management (SIEM), will provide customers with a broader set of IT-GRC solutions, ranging from policy orchestration and powerful security controls through real-time security event management and remediation. Archer’s technology will also benefit from complementary solutions such as EMC Ionix, helping customers automate IT configuration change and compliance across server, network, and storage environments—both physical and virtual.

Archer will provide EMC with a flexible platform of broad enterprise GRC capabilities that will augment the security and GRC capabilities of EMC Consulting, a line of business of EMC Global Services. These capabilities will be leveraged by Archer and EMC’s extensive partner ecosystems and be expanded over time.

“Operating in a cost-reduced environment amid a tough marketplace, with heightened governmental oversight and a promise of more regulations in 2010, poses significant challenges for today’s boards and management, who also face rising expectations from stakeholders,” said Greg Bell, principal and global services leader for KPMG’s information protection practice. “The announcement by EMC and Archer indicates a continuing trend of service organizations joining to leverage their unique capabilities in a way that will help companies meet the challenges of today’s market.”

EMC’s acquisition of Archer is expected to close in the first quarter of 2010, subject to customary closing conditions. Archer will remain in Overland Park, Kan., upon completion of the acquisition and operate as a part of The Security Division of EMC.

Social networking site Twitter announced that it has recently acquired geolocation services provider Mixer Labs to allow Twitter users to tag the location of where a message was written.

Mixer Labs, a start-up company founded by two former Google employees, developed a location-tracking tool called GeoAPI. Developers will be able to harness the GeoAPI engine to add relevant location information to Twitter messages.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog: “When current location is added to tweets, new and valuable services emerge—everything from breaking news to finding friends or local businesses can be dramatically enhanced.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Paladyne Systems, a provider of technology and services to the global hedge fund industry, announced its continued global expansion with the opening of a Hong Kong office in response to an increasing demand for its hedge fund technology and services in the Asia Pacific region.

As part of the move, Paladyne appointed Eric Royer as the new regional director of Paladyne Asia with responsibility for managing all aspects of Paladyne’s Asian business operations. Prior to joining Paladyne, Royer served as Managing Director of Tradar Asia and established their Hong Kong office. Royer managed all local operations for Tradar Asia including sales, client support, account management, product management, quality assurance, and professional services.

Paladyne provides alternative asset managers in Asia Pacific with a standardized and integrated front-, middle-, and back-office solution which is scalable and cost effective and improves transparency. The Paladyne suite is available either as a local install or as a hosted Application Service Provider solution.

Travis Wolff & Co., a regional accounting and advisory firm, announced that it has merged with San Antonio-based Burnside & Rishebarger.

The combined organization will operate as TravisWolff Independent Advisors & Accountants, representing approximately $25 million in annual revenue. The merger blends TravisWolff’s staff of 130 with Burnside & Rishebarger’s staff of 25, creating one of the largest independent accounting firms in Texas.

TravisWolff was founded in 1991, while Burnside & Rishebarger has been in operation since 1985.

eMagic, an e-commerce subsidiary of Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corporation, has announced that Wolters Kluwer Financial Services’ initial home loan disclosures are now available from within the eMagic service fulfillment platform. The integration will provide eMagic’s mortgage lending customers with seamless, electronic access to Wolters Kluwer Financial Services’ VMP Mortgage Solutions compliance disclosures.

“Our relationship with Wolters Kluwer streamlines the process for eMagic customers,” said eMagic Director Chad Northington. “By adding the convenience of accessing loan program and state-specific mortgage disclosure documents from within eMagic, users are able to continue their workflow without disruption.”

eMagic customers can add Wolters Kluwer Financial Services disclosures to the eMagic platform’s Trio Folder and then deliver them securely through the eMagic Message Center. This provides an audit trail of exactly when the documents were sent as well as whenever documents are returned through the Message Center. Additionally the disclosure-ordering process automatically pulls certain company information to include on the disclosures.

Thomson Reuters has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the Abacus Enterprise suite of products and related business operations from Deloitte.

The Abacus suite of products helps corporations and their advisers plan, comply, and remit income taxes and value-added taxes. Based in London, the business offers software products to customers in the U.K., Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Hong Kong as well as supplying VAT software for 20 countries in the European Union. Approximately 40 employees will transfer with the business.

The Abacus products fill a gap that enhances Thomson Reuters’ overall portfolio in the U.K. market. Abacus solutions will be integrated with other leading Thomson Reuters software and digital brands such as ONESOURCE, a Web-based corporate tax portal that provides single sign-on capabilities and tools that help practitioners manage documents and track their workflow, as well as TaxStream, Paisley, and Checkpoint.

This announcement follows Tax & Accounting’s launch of its sales and support operations in the UK in 2007, and the acquisition of national software provider Digita in 2008. Digita provides integrated tax compliance, and accounting software and services to accounting, tax, and corporate finance professionals serving a client base of over 5,000 users, including 16 of the top 50 accounting firms and three top 10 firms. Abacus also has a strategic distribution relationship in the UK with software provider Sage, which will be retained by Thomson Reuters. Post acquisition, Thomson Reuters will employ over 150 tax technologists and professionals in the U.K.

The transaction is expected to close at a later date. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Securities class-action law firm Barroway Topaz Kessler Meltzer & Check has opened a San Francisco office.

“Our West Coast opening reflects our continued growth in representing institutional clients in shareholder, ERISA, and consumer class actions being litigated in California,” said Darren Check, a partner with Barroway Topaz. “In addition, a growing number of our important institutional investor clients are California-based, and it was a logical step for us to establish a permanent presence here in San Francisco to better serve their litigation needs.”

In related news, Ramzi Abadou, a partner of Barroway Topaz, has been appointed to manage the new San Francisco office. Abadou, who joined the firm in June, was formerly a partner with Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins, where he was one of the lead litigators in the landmark options backdating case against insurer UnitedHealth Group, among other high-profile matters.

As partner-in-charge of the new office, Abadou will help direct Barroway Topaz’s expanding caseload representing individual and institutional shareholder clients. Among some of the more prominent matters he is handling alongside the firm’s East Coast attorneys include securities cases against Medtronic and SemGroup Energy Partners.

Rounding out the San Francisco office are associates Nichole Browning and Erik Peterson. Browning, who has been with Barroway Topaz for several years, has extensive experience litigating securities class actions and options backdating derivative actions. Peterson arrived at Barroway Topaz with Abadou, and previously worked with him on several major securities class-action cases at Coughlin Stoia.