Team size:  Seven

What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

We, as the plaintiff, participated in a rights protection lawsuit concerning the company’s core brand. After going through three levels of review, we finally won the case successfully.

Through this lawsuit, a large number of counterfeit merchants in the market were effectively eliminated, creating greater market space for the company.

Meanwhile, we are also an overseas compliance business partner for children’s smartwatches. By providing compliance advice, we effectively ensure that the company’s products meet the relevant product regulations of multiple countries when they leave the factory, covering countries in Europe and Southeast Asia.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience? 

During periods of instability or crisis, we have put forward the requirement of “compliance by default” and “compliance by design”. We have also established a compliance self-inspection procedure and integrated it into the business processes to ensure that laws must be taken as an evaluation item in the business advancement process, guarantee the default legality of the business, and avoid regulatory risks caused by market uncertainty.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting? 

To address the issue of counterfeit products of our company being sold on an e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia, I presented the rights protection and governance procedures of Chinese e-commerce platforms to the person in charge of this platform as a reference, successfully promoting the establishment of a rights protection platform by the e-commerce platform. I not only met the company’s rights protection needs, but also improved the service level of the e-commerce platform. Furthermore, I helped the company establish a deeper cooperative relationship with the platform, achieving a win-win situation in business.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?

Over the past year, the application of legal AI has achieved significant development, and it is foreseeable that relevant applications will further improve the efficiency of legal professionals in the future. However, I believe legal AI still has much room for development, especially in eliminating AI hallucinations and ensuring data compliance. At the same time, in-house lawyers should also use the contract AI review function cautiously. This is because contract clauses are the result of negotiations and compromises between the two parties, and AI cannot judge the rationality of such compromises. Therefore, it is advisable to minimize the involvement of AI in contract review.

What is a cause, business or otherwise, that you are passionate about? Why is this?

I love business consulting services. Providing business consulting to others and helping them achieve commercial success makes me happy and excited. At the same time, the process of communicating with others allows me to learn more diverse business knowledge and improve my cognitive level.

What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?   

The significance of a case and the workload saturation of the team are key bases for my decision to either engage external lawyers or handle the matter in-house. Regarding the evaluation criteria for the performance of external partners, I have five requirements, including: the case outcome meeting or exceeding expectations, the team having a strong sense of responsibility, the executors possessing rich experience, the lead person being able to insight into and understand the real needs of the client, and the commissioned quotation being reasonable.

Looking forward, what trends do you foresee in the legal landscape over the next 5 –10 years that companies should prepare for?

Over the next 5 to 10 years, I believe there will be four trends: China’s right to speak will be further strengthened, while geopolitical conflicts will intensify; the strengthening of personal data protection by various countries will lead to multi-faceted supervision over cross-border data transmission, increasing the risk of non-compliance; countries’ attention to ESG will continue to rise, and enterprises’ related investments will increase; AI will shift from general large models to being dominated by multi-application AI based on general large models.