Director of Intellectual Property and Legal Affairs Center | Shenzhen DYMIND Biotechnology
Sunny Li
Director of Intellectual Property and Legal Affairs Center | Shenzhen DYMIND Biotechnology
Team Size: Ten
What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?
Our company has established a commercial secret protection system, aiming to prevent and address improper infringement of the company’s commercial secrets by employees or competitors. Recently, upon receiving reports or leads, we discovered that some core employees in the R&D and marketing departments violated company regulations and stole a large amount of confidential information before their resignation.
After the legal department obtained the report leads, I, as the person in charge, collaborated with an external legal team to plan three commercial secret protection cases and immediately launched a special rights protection campaign. These cases included two civil cases and one criminal case. Despite significant challenges in the evidence collection and criminal case filing process, the litigation team successfully overcame difficulties. All three cases resulted in victories or achieved the expected rights protection outcomes, which not only effectively safeguarded the company’s commercial secret rights and prevented the spread of infringing acts but also demonstrated the effectiveness of our company’s commercial secret management system.
How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?
In my understanding, periods of instability or crisis refer to phases where the team faces personnel turnover, or the legal department confronts major litigation or compliance risks.
If facing major litigation or compliance risks, I first remain calm: I consider forming a response team, securing company support, and clarifying my role, taking the lead in formulating response strategies and plans, coordinating resources to gain leadership approval, and selecting the right people precisely (just like choosing external lawyers) to leverage team members’ strengths.
If the team is unstable, I first analyze the root causes, such as issues related to corporate operating budgets, internal management, or employee benefits, and address them targeted; meanwhile, I strengthen team building, happing a positive culture, inspiring team members’ enthusiasm, cultivating reserve talents to build a talent echelon, and solidifying and passing on organisational experience. Through these measures, organisational resilience is ensured.
Given the current geopolitical shifts and growing uncertainties around international free trade, has your company’s risk profile evolved, and are you taking measures to address these challenges?
Currently, changes in the geopolitical landscape and uncertainties in international trade continue to intensify. Meanwhile, our company is in a phase of business expansion and increasing market influence, and the growing number of business touchpoints has raised the probability of compliance risks being exposed. Additionally, the original management system lacks mechanisms for preventing and addressing compliance risks. Under the superposition of these factors, the company’s overall risk profile has undergone significant changes.
As the person in charge of legal and compliance affairs, I have advanced response work through four aspects: First, strengthening executives’ awareness of compliance, conveying core compliance risk points through training and regular risk reports, and inviting external compliance experts to conduct in-house exchanges to help executives intuitively understand the role of compliance in safeguarding business operations through industry cases. Second, integrating compliance into strategic planning, during the company’s strategic analysis, simultaneously sorting out external compliance risks brought by geopolitics and international trade, identifying compliance shortcomings in the existing management system, and further proposing a blueprint for building a compliance management system that aligns with business development. Third, building a compliance team and integrating resources, proactively applying for special resources to establish a compliance management team, engaging external compliance experts as consultants, and advancing system construction through a project-based approach, with a focus on conducting special work in key areas such as trade compliance, data compliance, and anti-commercial bribery. Fourth, cultivating internal compliance capabilities, building an internal team of compliance specialists through systematic training, clear appointments, and incentive mechanisms, and collaborating with various departments to appoint part-time compliance managers, forming a full-time plus part-time compliance collaboration network to continuously enhance the team’s overall compliance management capabilities and risk awareness.
AI has been taken seriously as a potentially revolutionary technological change in the legal world for a number of years now. Has it had a meaningful impact in how your legal team works in this time?
AI has had a significant impact on the work methods of our company’s legal team, and this impact extends not only to our team but also to the entire legal industry. Currently, there is an increasing variety of AI tools available on the market, including commercial, professional, and general-purpose tools. Although some tools are not yet fully refined, proactively utilising these tools is key to enhancing organisational capabilities and improving the efficiency of legal work. Therefore, we first established a embrace AI mindset, encouraging the team to proactively pay attention to and experiment with AI legal tools, and transforming traditional work concepts.
Specifically, AI’s impact is concentrated in three aspects: First, facilitating legal research and case analysis, AI significantly improves efficiency in researching legal provisions across multiple fields, foreign-related legal information, as well as analysing patent novelty and inventiveness and conducting patent searches. Second, empowering business departments, by developing AI agents, we can provide convenient legal consultation services to business departments and assist in identifying and drafting patent disclosure documents, supporting the efficient advancement of business operations. Third, optimising training and report preparation, AI can quickly generate training materials and assist in preparing legal risk reports, greatly saving time costs.
To continuously leverage the value of AI, we have also invested special resources to establish a specialised internal team and allocate a dedicated budget, assigning personnel to be responsible for exploring and using AI tools as well as passing on related capabilities, ensuring that AI can continuously empower the team’s work.
What is a cause, business or otherwise, that you are passionate about? Why is this?
Combined with my work experience and industry observations, I am mainly passionate about three business areas that are crucial to the long-term development of enterprises, namely compliance work, litigation business, and organisational capability enhancement. Each area carries unique value, and the details are as follows.
To begin with, I have always been passionate about compliance work. The core reason is that many enterprises and especially private enterprises, still have a cognitive bias of prioritising business over compliance. However, with the tightening of regulatory policies and the increasing complexity of the market environment, such as the refinement of export control compliance requirements in international trade and personal information protection requirements in the field of data security, compliance has shifted from an optional item to a mandatory requirement for enterprise management, risk control, and stable operation. If compliance construction is neglected in the early stage, minor risks will gradually accumulate into major hidden dangers, just like delaying treatment when one is ill, which misses the best opportunity for intervention. Preventing problems before they occur is precisely the core task and mission of compliance management. By building a compliance system covering the entire business process and proactively identifying risk points in links such as supply chain management and contract management, we can help enterprises avoid operational pitfalls and lay a solid foundation for their long-term development.
The litigation business is also an area I am passionate about. Whether it is passively responding to external disputes, such as contract breaches and intellectual property infringement cases, or proactively initiating rights protection actions, such as commercial secret protection and unfair competition disputes, I feel a strong sense of value. On one hand, I have accumulated rich experience in formulating litigation strategies, organising evidence, and handling court proceedings, and am proficient in resolving the company’s difficult problems through legal mean, for example, I once won a commercial secret infringement case by accurately presenting key evidence, helping the company recover significant economic losses. This process of solving practical problems directly demonstrates the supporting value of the legal department to the business. On the other hand, every litigation case serves as a window to examine the company’s management: from cases, we can review internal system loopholes such as inadequate implementation of employee confidentiality agreements and non-standard customer information management, and further promote the optimisation of management processes, forming a closed-loop process of case handling, problem rectification-system improvement. This extends the value of litigation beyond winning the cases to the optimisation and upgrading of enterprise management.
Furthermore, promoting the enhancement of team and system capabilities is a direction I have long focused on and invested effort in. First, in terms of talent development, I have always believed that 80%-90% of the outstanding talents who are suitable for the company’s business needs, such as compliance specialists, litigation backbones, and intellectual property management talents, need to be cultivated internally. For example, through mentorship programs under the veteran guiding novice initiative, regular legal practice training, and providing opportunities to participate in core cases or compliance projects, team members can grow from being able to do things to being able to take on responsibilities. This is not only key to ensuring the quality of legal work but also the core source of the company’s talent reserve.
Second, in terms of management system upgrading, by promoting the integrated application of information technology and AI tools, we integrate compliance, legal, and intellectual property work into the company’s overall management more efficiently: for instance, using AI tools to assist in contract review and patent novelty searches to reduce repetitive work; using information systems to accumulate legal cases and compliance manuals, making knowledge and experience reusable and transferable. This not only improves the team’s work efficiency but also shifts the legal work from passive response to active empowerment, further strengthening the resilience and competitiveness of the organisation.