Asian investors are increasingly reaching for their lawyers in the face of high losses but the litigation headaches are not yet big enough to drive wealth managers out of the Asian region.

As Asia joins the world's financial crisis, high net worth investors have proven ready to reach for their lawyers as part of an attempt to recover lost wealth, in court actions against big players like UBS, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.

But while litigious action is breaking out in a number of Asian jurisdictions, the problems are not yet serious enough to drive Western investment houses out of Asia. The Asian wealth management prize is too big for the major players to consider more than temporary staff cuts. And, to date, no analyst has suggested major changes on past predictions about the future of wealth making in the region.

Assets have tripled to $600 billion in ex-Japan Asia in the past five years, according to Singapore-based consulting firm Calamander Group, headed up by former Boston Consulting Group consultant Roman Scott. More than half of the growth was contributed by five players: UBS, Citigroup, HSBC, Credit Suisse and Merrill Lynch.

But one major change that is now expected is smaller, niche players lapping up pockets of the market that the giants might end up neglecting, whilst battling for survival and losing executives on the ground to poachers.

So with such a strong recent run, any setbacks are encouraging some wealth management executives to look at market falls as a chance to make lucrative investments in their businesses and staffing levels.

For instance, Didier von Daeniken, chief executive, Barclays Wealth Asia Pacific, views the emerging situation as one offering "unprecedented investment opportunities" to pick up low-priced stocks, whilst many investors are selling financial assets to recover what they can and somehow balance books tainted by excess leveraging.

Many of the derivatives and structured products, with or without subprime flavour, may have been born in the US but they became instant hits with the wealthy in Asia, who saw the structures and the system of leveraging as the best way to achieve larger gains.

A process of deleveraging has set in and it is this that is causing severe calls on clients' accounts.

"Although this does not affect clients of Julius Baer Family Services, deleveraging has resulted in more extensive margin calls on investors' accounts in Singapore," Geoffroy Dedieu, head of Julius Baer's Singapore office, told WealthBriefing.

"Most investors in London would not leverage as much as they do in Asia. It increases the overall risk to the portfolio," he said, while explaining that his bank, being more conservative, would usually advise its ultra high net worth clients not to leverage too much.

But litigation risk has emerged as a serious issue for Asian-based wealth managers to contend with, although different parts of the region are more prone to this than others.

In Jakarta, one Indonesian client has sued Merrill Lynch for $90 million in damages for allegedly selling shares without his knowledge.

Another Indonesian family has taken on UBS in a Singapore court seeking $8.6 million in damages complaining that the bank had kept them in the dark about the risks involved in a currency accumulator that went sour.

And Goldman Sachs is under attack by a Hong Kong businesswoman, Joyce Tsang, who claims that the bank had traded accumulators for her account without her authorisation. Both UBS and Goldman Sachs have denied any wrong doing.

It is not just the clients that are complaining. Merrill has moved in the Singapore court against a client, Prem Harjani, accusing him of refusing to pay back $12 million.

Many banks are faced with the problem of clients refusing to pay back the loans they took for leveraging on their accounts. Merrill may be fighting this case because it considers Mr Harjani, owner of a bank in Jakarta, as a person who can afford to pay back, industry sources said.

But legal departments of many banks are reluctant to go after clients that may have become bankrupt or have very little resources left to repay loans.