A team of lawyers from Morris, Manning & Martin is advising HK Motors in its deal to launch a hybrid car manufacturing plant in Baldwin County, Ala.

The would-be carmaker most recently inked a $500 million development agreement with Italdesign Giugiaro to design and engineer a fleet of hybrid cars that Pasadena, Calif.-based HK Motors plans to begin producing in 2013 at a yet-to-be built plant in Bay Minette, Ala.

HK Motors has said it plans to make an initial $1.5 billion investment in the plant that will eventually make low-emission vehicles including sedans, SUVs, vans and taxis with hybrid engines that run on compressed natural gas, electricity and gasoline. The total planned investment is $4.3 billion

Morris Manning partners Tim Xia, Sandra S. Gardiner and F. Lawrence Street advised HK Motors on the development agreement with Turin, Italy-based Italdesign, which also has collaborated with companies such as BMW and Lamborghini. The firm also advised HK Motors on its organizational structure, production agreements, financing, employment issues, intellectual property, technology transfer and local government incentives.

Xia, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment on the deal.

HK Motors, according to press reports, has creative funding plans for its venture, which include raising money via the EB-5 visa program, which offers U.S. citizenship to Chinese who invest at least $500,000 in the project. The company has said it intends to meet this year's goal of raising $1.3 billion via a Hong Kong stock filing submitted by Far East Golden Resources, a company controlled by HK Motors' founder and CEO, Benjamin Yeung.

Yeung is the former chairman and CEO of Chinese automaker Brilliance Group.

The process to develop and finance Atlanta's BeltLine, a proposed 22-mile loop of transit, green space and mixed-use development, has not been an easy one. But in December, lawyers from three Atlanta firms—Hunton & Williams, Greenberg Traurig and Murray Barnes Finister—worked on various aspects of the deal that resulted in a $78.1 million bond issuance that refinances some of the BeltLine's debt on more favorable terms.

Douglass P. Selby, a Hunton & Williams municipal finance partner, represented the city of Atlanta and Atlanta BeltLine Inc. in the reissuance of $64.5 million in Series 2008 BeltLine tax-exempt tax allocation district (TAD) bonds, which were remarketed to new investors. Selby also worked on the issuance of about $13.6 million in new TAD bonds.

The transaction, said Selby, refinances a private placement done in October 2008—right around the time Lehman Brothers collapsed—when credit markets were anything but favorable.

“It was the worst of all possible times,” said Selby. But, he explained, the BeltLine needed the money to acquire what's known as the Northeast corridor property, 4.5-mile section of the proposed BeltLine that was purchased from Gwinnett developer Wayne Mason. “SunTrust and Wachovia were kind enough to extend credit during that time,” Selby said. “The 2008 structure was always meant to be a temporary sort of placeholder.”

Now that credit markets have recovered a bit, he said, the BeltLine was able to reissue the bonds “without the burdensome call features that the 2008 financing had attendant to it … . The 2008 holders could put their bonds, requiring the city to refinance them. The new financing is more traditional long-term financing,” he said.

The new debt, which has an average yield of about 7.5 percent, matures in 2031, he said. Nine investors purchased the new issuance, which Selby said was oversubscribed.

“It was a very good sign, the fact that there were more buyers interested in buying the paper than there were bonds,” he said. He also said that the BeltLine project likely will go back to market later this year with an issue for new money purposes that will include city, county and school board increments.

Selby said his team, which also included tax partner William H. McBride in the firm's Raleigh, N.C., and Washington offices and Atlanta public finance associate Rachel L. Devenow, began working on the issuance with the leader of the investment banking syndicate, Wachovia (now Wells Fargo) in October. SunTrust and Jackson Securities also were part of the syndicate, which was represented by Teresa P. Finister of Murray Barnes Finister. Kenneth M. Neighbors from Greenberg Traurig served as disclosure counsel to the city. Veronica C. Jones, general counsel of the Atlanta Development Authority, the implementing agency for the BeltLine project, could not be reached for comment by press time.

Two Atlanta lawyers recently helped their clients—one based in China and the other based here—ink a lease agreement on nearly 14,000 square feet of space in Atlantic Station.

Jones Day lawyer R. Mason Cargill assisted business incubator Chinamex in establishing a U.S. subsidiary and negotiating a 7-year, 10-month lease to house its new North American headquarters here. The lease was signed in mid-December, with Philip G. Skinner of Arnall Golden Gregory representing Atlantic Station.

Chinamex, a private Beijing-based company which helps other Chinese firms expand overseas, is the brainchild of parent company Chinamex Middle East Investment and Trade Promotion Centre, which already has established other business outposts in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Cargill said that Atlanta, thanks to good marketing and lots of personal attention from the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, won out over San Francisco as the incubator's U.S. headquarters. Chinamex, he said, plans to exhibit products manufactured by companies in the Hubei Province and its capital city, Wuhan, which has a population of about 10 million and is about an hour by air from Shanghai. Chinamex also will offer consulting and temporary office space and will help Chinese companies that want to deal more directly with the U.S. market to set up operations here, primarily for marketing their products.

Cargill and Skinner both said that U.S. leases are longer and more complex than leases in China, which meant that Chinamex officials had a lot of questions about the provisions and that negotiations took a bit longer than they might have with a U.S. tenant. Also, Skinner said, leases for mixed-use projects like Atlantic Station are by nature more complex than for free-standing office buildings because they involve covenants governing how a project can be developed and used and who pays for services that are used by the whole project.

Although Atlanta has been courting Chinese business for some time—Cargill was part of a prospecting trip to China, along with then-Mayor Shirley Franklin and the Metro Chamber in 2006—East-West business hasn't yet taken off in a big way here. The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported that four much-promoted Chinese investment projects announced in the past three years have yet to come to fruition. These stalled projects include Kingwasong LLC's plans to produce soy sauce in Newnan and construction equipment manufacturer Sany Heavy Industry Co.'s plans for a $30 million investment in Peachtree City.

Still, Cargill—who spent several years in his firm's Shanghai office—said he thinks business relations will someday blossom between Atlanta and China. Developments are slow now because of the economy, he said, and because Chinese companies don't have the same incentives that Japanese companies had to set up operations here—namely, a cheaper work force than was available at home.

Still, he said, “I'm very optimistic. … I think it may be a slow process. A gradual process, but I think it'll happen.”

Hunton & Williams partners G. Roth Kehoe II and David R. Yates have spent so much time in Connecticut recently that they joke about being entitled to vote there.

The lawyers, who have spent about 18 months putting together a public-private concessions deal that will involve investment of about $178 million, may one day be able to enjoy the fruits of their labors in the form of a full tank of gas, a meatball marinara sandwich from SUBWAY or a cup of coffee and a chocolate glazed from Dunkin' Donuts when driving Connecticut's highways.

That's because the deal gives Hunton's client, Project Service LLC, the right to redevelop, operate and maintain 23 highway service areas across the state for a 35-year term in exchange for bankrolling all improvements and renovations. The transaction includes a revenue-sharing agreement with the state, and what Kehoe describes as other “minimum payments” from Project Service to the state throughout the life of the agreement.

Project Service is a joint venture comprised of private equity firm The Carlyle Group; Doctor's Associates Inc., the parent company of SUBWAY Restaurants; and SubCon Inc., the development company for SUBWAY in Connecticut and New York, which serves as franchisee for some 400 SUBWAY locations.

Kehoe said the state, which was represented by Connecticut law firm Halloran & Sage, issued requests for proposals for the project in July 2008. His client was chosen as the preferred bidder, and began negotiations with the state this spring. The parties struck a deal in mid-November.

Previously, Kehoe said, the state ran the service areas itself via contracts with ExxonMobil and McDonald's but wanted to upgrade its facilities, which were built in the 1940s and 1950s, and increase food and fuel offerings. The service areas that come under the agreement are spread along Interstate 95, which is the Connecticut Turnpike; I-395 and State Route 15, also known as the Wilbur Cross and Merritt Parkways.

“The state was very excited and creative in deciding that it wanted a single contractor to deliver the entire package,” Kehoe said, adding that while other states have entered similar public-private concessions agreements—including Florida and Massachusetts—Connecticut's is unique because of the large-scale redevelopment handled by a single provider.

Kehoe said the economy, which has taken a toll on many states' coffers as tax revenues have fallen, is influencing states to consider public-private partnerships instead of the bond deals they might otherwise do. “I think there are a lot of states that are giving careful thought to monetizing assets in ways that would ultimately improve service for their users,” he said.

For example, the Georgia Department of Transportation is slated to hold a forum today to give members of the transportation industry a comprehensive overview of the state's new Public Private Partnership program, known as P3, which is likely to focus on road construction and toll projects.

While Georgia has a statute governing public-private partnerships, Kehoe and Yates said Connecticut does not. “That actually makes things a little more challenging,” Kehoe said. “The [public-private partnership] statutes can be somewhat limiting, but they also give you a clear avenue in terms of how things should come together.”

In the absence of such a statute, he said, lawyers have to create their own structure for the deal, looking at procurement laws and hypothesizing about how various parts of the transaction should work under different scenarios.

Public-private partnership projects can be politically charged. Connecticut State Sen. Andrew McDonald has called for a financial analysis of the Project Service contract. A lease deal involving the Pennsylvania Turnpike that was supported by Gov. Ed Rendell died when the Legislature, which opposed the plan, failed to act on an outstanding bid.

But Yates said that as more public-private partnerships like this happen and succeed, “It's just going to become more and more comfortable … and there won't be as much resistance from a political standpoint.”

Also, he pointed out, there's a lot of benefit to be gleaned from public-private partnerships. For example, Connecticut's governor, M. Jodi Rell, has estimated that the benefit her state will gain over the life of the Project Service contract will be nearly $500 million.

On Wednesday, Arnall Golden Gregory partner Tycho Stahl was driving on the Autobahn near Münster, Germany, logging yet more miles on what has, so far, been a two-week, 3,000-mile road trip to meet with clients interested in doing business in the United States.

But his thoughts weren't only on the roadway famous for its high rates of speed. He was focused on Meriwether County, Ga., where he'd just completed a $9 million deal to bring the U.S. affiliate of a German client that makes components used in steel manufacturing to the rural south.

It's just one of a number of cross-border transactions that Stahl, a German native educated in the United States, is juggling these days. Speaking on his cell phone, he said that European companies—many of them family-owned and able to fund transactions with their own cash rather than by chasing scarce bank financing—are looking for opportunities in the United States because they have clients here.

U.S. communities are making them feel welcome with tax incentives, financial guarantees and help in training employees, constructing buildings and acquiring land and equipment.

Stahl's client, Gustav Wiegard Maschinenfabrik GmbH & Co., is a fourth-generation family business based in Witten, Germany, and its U.S. affiliate, Gustav Wiegard North America LP, is financed by a number of investors from around the globe. Wiegard manufactures huge, multi-ton rollers used to flatten cold-rolled steel.

The company, said Stahl, wants to come to the United States because one of its clients, ThyssenKrupp Steel and Stainless USA is building a $4.6 billion state-of-the-art steel and stainless steel processing facility in Calvert, Ala.

Meriwether, a rural county about 50 miles southwest of Atlanta with a population of about 22,500 spread over about 500 square miles, used a combination of incentives, financing and good chemistry to compete successfully against a number of other communities and win the deal.

Tyron C. Elliott of the Elliott Law Firm in Manchester, Ga., represented the Meriwether County Industrial Development Authority. “We've worked with Gustav Wiegard for a year, and we went to Germany to tour their plants,” he said. “We didn't know a great deal about the business of making these steel rollers, so we had to learn a lot.”

One of the things they learned, he said, is that the Wiegard executives weren't just interested in the bottom line; they were interested in developing a good, working relationship with the authorities in the region where they located.

So the Industrial Authority, along with the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and the State of Georgia worked together to offer Wiegard a deal. That deal, said Elliott, includes building the company a 30,000-square-foot, $2.5 million to $3 million plant, financed in part by the Industrial Authority via a loan from F&M Bank and Trust Co. which will be offered to Wiegard on a 10-year lease-purchase arrangement. The building will be in a state-of-the-art industrial park that already has one international business in operation, the Korean Dongwon Autopart Technology, which supplies components for the Kia Motors automobile plant in West Point, Ga.

The deal also includes financing for Wiegard's equipment and machinery, provided by another local bank, Meriwether Bank & Trust. And it includes a rebate on Georgia income and unemployment taxes under a state economic stimulus program and access to an employee job training program through a branch of West Georgia Technical College.

A number of other communities offered incentives, too, said Elliott, and delegations from Auburn and Pell City, Ala., even traveled to Germany to meet with Wiegard executives.

“There are many high-quality communities, high-quality industrial parks that have great highway access, great can-do attitude and are willing to make land available,” said Stahl. “I think where Meriwether came out ahead is they all put their shoulders together and pulled. It's the State of Georgia; it's the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce; it's the county, which provided loan guarantees; the local banks; the developer; the Meriwether Industrial Authority.” And, he said, they all worked to develop relationships with Wiegard.

Wiegard, with revenues Stahl estimates in the low nine-figure range, has sales offices all over the world, including one in Washington State. But it now will consolidate its U.S. operations in Meriwether County, where the plant is expected to be up and running by mid-2010. Elliott said the plant, which is planned as a multiphase project, initially will employ 50 people, and later add about 30 more.

Stahl, who worked on the deal with about a dozen other Arnall Golden lawyers including John L. Gornall, Steven A. Kay, Neil P. Mulcahy, Hyun-Zu “Yonni” Kim, John G. Spinrad and Stephen P. “Steve” Pocalyko, said his team's work includes negotiating and drafting project agreements and contracts, handling employment-related legal work, real estate issues, environmental matters and permits and financing for construction and suppliers.

He said Wiegard, like his other European clients—the one he was driving to see on Wednesday was a supplier for the oil and gas industry interested in coming to Texas—also want their U.S lawyers to minimize their risks of doing business here.

So what Stahl and his team also do is set up U.S. arms of the company early on, negotiate with customers and suppliers so that the contractual risk stays with the U.S. entity and set up insurance so that liability stays with the U.S. entity.

“People have heard horror stories about product liability and similar things in the United States, and about lawyers run amuck. They worry about market risks.” But, he added, “Georgia has some pretty amazing [incentive programs], as do other states. All of those things help reduce the risk to foreign companies entering the U.S. market. Most Europeans when they come to the region are favorably surprised by the engagement in the region.”

About a year ago, Troutman Sanders lawyer John Stephenson was sitting in the Chick-fil-A Bowl office near Centennial Olympic Park when his client, Bowl President Gary Stokan, proffered what you might call a modest proposal.

“He said, ‘I’ve got something I want to talk to you about,’” Stephenson recalled, adding that he’d come to Stokan’s office on a mundane Bowl matter. But when his client continued, the topic was anything but routine. “’We’re going to bring the College Football Hall of Fame to Atlanta,’” Stephenson said Stokan told him. “It was more of a statement than a question.”

It was an ambitious idea. Atlanta first tried—unsuccessfully—to lure the Hall of Fame, which is part of the National Football Foundation, in 1995. What’s more, the Hall of Fame, which opened that same year in South Bend, Ind., was bound in a 40-year contract with its host city.

But Stokan and George Morris, a former pro-football player and Atlanta business executive who spent 30 years as an official with the Southeastern Conference, persevered.

After more than a year of negotiations not typical of any deal Stephenson said he’s worked on, Stokan announced on Sept. 24 that Atlanta had trumped Dallas its quest to bring the Hall of Fame home. 

“From a lawyer’s perspective, it was really an exercise in patience,” Stephenson said. “We weren’t responding to proposed terms as you typically would in a bidding process. … We really had to … gauge the sensitivities of the situation. There was a lot of confidentiality, because the talks were going on for a year, and we really had to let the [National Football] Foundation manage their relationship with South Bend.”

Citing a statement made by Steve Hatchell, president of the NFF, Stephenson added, “This was not an RFP process. It was much more organic than that. The College Football Hall of Fame needed a bigger platform to further their goals.”

In South Bend, he said, the Hall of Fame had been garnering 60,000 to 70,000 visitors per year—far less than the expected 200,000. Atlanta, he added, being a tourist center in the middle of a football state, can probably offer 500,000.

No money changed hands in the deal, Stephenson said. “It wasn’t a money thing,” he said. “It was more about what the people on this committee that were trying to bring the College Football Hall of Fame here could offer them, and could show them the potential of what could happen here.”

Once negotiations on issues such as governance were complete with Dallas-based NFF, Stephenson said the parties operated more like partners than adversaries. 

Stephenson said he’ll continue to work with his client and the NFF’s counsel-- Holme, Roberts  & Owen in Colorado Springs, Colo-- on the terms of a definitive agreement to govern the relationship going forward.

Plans for the Hall, which in the letter of intent contemplates a 30-year deal with Atlanta, include building a 50,000 square foot facility likely to cost $50 million.

Stephenson said the Hall is considering several parcels of land around Centennial Olympic Park, but added that because it is so early in the process, it’s unclear how the building will be financed and who the construction and financing lawyers might be.

About $11 million in corporate sponsorships—including $5 million from the Chick-fil-A Bowl, $5 million from Chick-fil-A and $1 million from the Atlanta Development Authority—already have been committed. Troutman Sanders handled the documentation, to the extent there was any, on those commitments, Stephenson said.

Stephenson represented the Bowl pro bono, as he generally does on other matters. The Bowl is a non-profit organization which has given more than $1 million to charity in each of the past two years.

Also, he said, as an Atlanta native and Double Dawg, with bachelor’s and law degrees from the University of Georgia, he was simply happy to do the work. “I was bred to be a Bulldog,” he said. “That’s why I like to do this. I’m an Atlanta guy. I’m a football fan. And I was raised on Chick-fil-A sandwiches.”

When four of Georgia’s leading health care and research centers wanted to join forces to establish a medical device creation and marketing consortium, lawyer Phillip H. Street was there to help them give birth to their brainchild.

The result is the Global Center for Medical Innovation, which unites Georgia Tech, St. Joseph’s Translational Research Institute, Piedmont Healthcare and the Georgia Research Alliance via contracts and operational guidelines that Street, a partner with Kilpatrick Stockton, drafted and is still developing.

“The goal of the entity is to leverage the research done both locally and nationally,” said Street. “It will work as a conduit to help … [get] research to viable commercial outlets. The legal framework … deals with intellectual property issues, commercial licensing, corporate issues, tax issues.

“There’s a lot of legal work yet to be done.”

That’s not surprising given the Global Center’s focus on getting medical devices to market.

Wayne Hodges, the acting vice provost of Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute and one of the primary people behind the founding of the Global Center, said a central motivation for launching it was to move intellectual property out of the university setting and into an arena that allowed for more aggressive development, specifically of medical devices related to cardiology, orthopedics and pediatrics.

“Look at the hospitals—some of the leading clinicians in the country and the world are here in Atlanta. But some of these organizations did not have intellectual property development, so we sat down and started talking about that,” Hodges said. “How could we better support this? How could we speed up the process of commercializing these devices?”

His conclusion: “Infrastructure is important” in order to attract the attention of large companies and large investments.

According to Dr. Jay Yadav, chairman of the Piedmont Innovation Center and founder of medical device company CardioMEMS, the infrastructure that the Global Center proposes is rare, and doesn’t exist even in biotech epicenters such as Minneapolis and the San Francisco Bay area.

The new group, he said, will offer a prototyping center and an animal research facility.

“Right now, what happens is if you have a new device, you have to go all over the country to make parts of it,” he said. For animal research, he added, companies usually need to travel to the West Coast or North Carolina. “You can do it all here, now. It’s just very streamlined.”

The Global Center is financed by $400,000 in seed money—$100,000 from each of the four founding institutions. Yadav said millions more will be needed and acknowledged that this could be a challenge in the current economic environment.

Still, he added, the market is there. “The potential is very large. The medical device industry in the United States is almost a $100 billion industry.”

As for Street’s role in the ongoing development of the Global Center, Yadav jokingly adds, “It should generate plenty of legal work.”

During its efforts to secure economic incentives for its $1 billion manufacturing plant near Chattanooga, Volkswagen AG steered legal questions to Balch & Bingham partner Alex Leath.

Now the question becomes, what law firm will the German auto giant pick as its regular outside counsel for future matters in the U.S.? Balch is a contender for the prize assignment, Leath said. Chattanooga-based Miller & Martin is also bidding on the VW job, according to attorneys familiar with the law firm's plans.

Additionally, lawyers are also scrambling to represent other local governments in Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama that wish to lure suppliers that want to locate near VW’s first U.S.-based manufacturing plant, Leath said.

Leath, who is based in Birmingham, Ala., is not a newcomer to this type of legal work. Leath’s resume includes a stint advising the state of Alabama on negotiating incentives with Mercedes-Benz for a plant in Vance, Ala.; and another project advising Toyota on its plans for an assembly facility in Mississippi. His clients have also included Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Motors.

“Probably no lawyer in the Southeast has benefited from the re-industrialization of the South more than the one you’re talking to,” said Leath [photo, right].

In addition to the winning site in southeastern Tennessee, VW also looked at sites in Alabama and Michigan. Leath advised VW on the site-selection process and has continued advising VW on implementing its economic-incentive package and on negotiating details on construction agreements.

Among the incentives is a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement, in which Volkswagen has agreed to pay 29.23 percent of its Hamilton County, Tenn. property taxes between 2010 and 2039, according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press. After that, VW will pay 100 percent of its property tax bill.

VW’s plant will be located at the 1,300-acre Enterprise South industrial park east of Chattanooga. The 1.9 million-square-foot plant will build mid-sized sedans for the North American market, is expected to employ about 2,000 people, and is projected to begin operations in 2011, according to the Times Free Press.

Leath led a team of about 45 lawyers from Balch in a slew of practice areas, including environmental, real estate, labor and employment, corporate, tax, utilities, and railroad and trucking regulations. The Balch lawyers were spread out among the firm’s offices in Birmingham and Montgomery, Ala., and in Jackson, Miss.

Other attorneys who were involved in the economic-benefits package offered to VW, according to Leath, include: Miller & Martin partner Evan Allison in Chattanooga, who advised Hamilton County on real estate issues; Hamilton County Attorney Rheubin Taylor; Tennessee Department of Economic & Community Development General Counsel Stephanie Tisdale; and Chattanooga City Attorney Randy Nelson.

Hunton & Williams partner Robert Lockwood says his law firm has developed a symbiotic relationship with Denmark’s trade commission.

Danish companies looking to break into the U.S. market rely on Lockwood and his Hunton colleagues for legal advice on setting up shop in America. Hunton relies on its partnership with the Trade Commission of Denmark for a stream of new clients.

Consider the case of Mosbaek A/S, a Danish manufacturer of regulators used to control the flow of water in wastewater treatment plants. After handling some of Mosbaek’s legal work with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Hunton is now taking on new work for Mosbaek, which wants to expand its sales in the U.S. Lockwood and partner Eric Hanson are exploring whether it makes more sense for Mosbaek to go it alone in its American strategy, or whether the company should form a strategic partnership or a formal joint venture with a U.S. company.

Mosbaek first set up shop in America through the Danish trade council’s Accelerator program, which provides Danish companies with pre-established office space and a contact sheet for U.S.-based business advisers. Hunton is one of those advisers and the firm is frequently called upon by the trade office to provide a bevy of legal services to these Danish entrepreneurs, ranging from intellectual property to software licensing agreements to employment to privacy law.

“These are established Danish companies that already had a product or service in place,” Lockwood said. “They’re not looking for funding. They’re looking to penetrate the U.S. market.”

Other companies with whom Hunton developed a relationship through the Danish trade office include Celenia Software A/S, which develops applications for Microsoft software; shoemaker Euro-Dan Sko A/S; and Get Inside A/S, which makes software that creates three-dimensional visuals of real estate properties.

The Trade Commission of Denmark is an agency attached to Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The commission is based in Atlanta.

Arnall Golden Gregory partner John L. Gornall Jr. has been a facilitator of the Korean invasion of Middle Georgia.

Gornall and other AGG lawyers have advised four separate Korean companies on negotiating economic incentives for their new manufacturing plants in Middle Georgia. The AGG attorneys have also advised the companies on sundry other matters, including real estate, supplier contracts and environmental permits. The plants will supply the Kia Motors Corp. manufacturing facility under construction near West Point.

Hyundai Mobis will build a 310,000-square-foot plant to supply assorted auto parts to Kia. Glovis will build a 558,131-square-foot plant to provide auto parts and provide logistics services. Both the Hyundai Mobis and Glovis facilities will be located on the site of the Kia plant.

Dongwon Autopart Technology is building a 120,000 to 150,000-square-foot plant in Meriwether County where it will build door frames, side impact beams, roof molding, side absorbers and cross bars. And Kumho Tire Co. is building its first U.S. manufacturing facility in Bibb County. Kumho will supply not only Kia, but other automotive manufacturers located in the Southeast, Gornall said.

With all four clients, AGG teamed up with the law firm Kim & Chang of Seoul, South Korea.

AGG was able to nab the clients because of the firm’s previous work on behalf of the state of Georgia in its talks with Kia, Gornall said. The Kia plant, to be located off Interstate 85 about three miles east of the Alabama state line , will assemble small sedans and is expected to be fully operational in late 2009. It will be Kia’s first manufacturing plant in the U.S.

Although there was no formal, written agreement between Kia Motors and the state of Georgia that Kia’s suppliers would locate in the state, it has ended up that most suppliers have picked Georgia, Gornall said.

“One thing that I’ve been impressed with, Kia just had a gentlemen’s agreement with the state in that they would urge their suppliers to locate in Georgia,” he said. “They have certainly done that.”

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