VILAF review: services, fees, pros and cons

VILAF — the Vietnam International Law Firm — traces back to a group of lawyers who worked alongside Clifford Chance in Vietnam in the early 1990s before spinning off into an independent practice in 1993. Three decades on, it is one of the largest homegrown law firms in the country, with around 90 lawyers and 16 partners split between its Ho Chi Minh City head office and a Hanoi office on Lý Thường Kiệt Street in the Hoàn Kiếm district, a short walk from the Old Quarter.

VILAF has held first-tier status with The Legal 500 Asia Pacific for years and enters Chambers Asia-Pacific 2026 with Band 1 rankings across five practice areas, including Real Estate, Banking & Finance, Corporate/M&A, Dispute Resolution, and Projects & Energy. Its client roster, drawn from public deal announcements, leans corporate and institutional: developers, banks and multinationals such as HSBC, ANZ and BNP Paribas, rather than individual homebuyers walking in off the street.

For a foreign buyer, VILAF's relevance sits mainly in its Real Property practice group, which runs the due diligence a foreign purchase needs on land-use rights, title and project status. In practice that means checking a project's 30% foreign-ownership quota and 50-year renewable tenure under the Housing Law 2023, reviewing the Sale & Purchase Agreement clause by clause, confirming the developer's bank guarantee is actually on file with an eligible bank, and preparing a Power of Attorney if you are signing from abroad rather than in person.

The firm's English-speaking senior lawyers can run this process end-to-end without a translation layer, and its in-house banking practice is useful if your purchase also involves financing or a corporate holding structure — pairing naturally with a mortgage-capable bank such as the one covered in our HSBC Vietnam review. Where VILAF is a less natural fit is the standard single-condo purchase: it does not publish a retail fee card, and engagement terms — fixed fee or hourly — are confirmed only after an intake call, which is more typical of a Tier-1 corporate practice than a boutique conveyancing shop built for one-off transactions.

Legal facts in this review are grounded in the Housing Law 2023 (27/2023/QH15), in force since 1 August 2024. Firm facts (founding, offices, size, practice rankings) are drawn from VILAF's own published profile and its current listings with Chambers and Partners and The Legal 500 Asia Pacific — professional legal directories, cited here by name and left unlinked, consistent with our policy of linking only to official government and legal-text sources.