About

With a ‘long and stable’ career that has seen her operate at the highest levels of both private practice and in-house advice, Angie Au-Yong is able to draw from the very well-rounded skillset that typically characterises those who have straddled both sides of the legal world. Au-Yong believes this has contributed to her success as in-house counsel in Hong Kong. She says that an extensive private practice career builds technical and analytical legal knowledge in a way that purely in-house work cannot, and conversely that in-house work improves business acumen and cooperative interpersonal skills as private practice is less able to. By all accounts, Au-Yong has been able to blend the two effortlessly and her tenure at Citrix, where she is now vice president and regional general counsel international, has been one of huge success for both her and the company. In 2004, Au-Yong was tasked with setting the Citrix legal department in Hong Kong. Since that time her role and the team have grown significantly. Au-Yong is now in charge of the group’s global legal function (excluding the Americas) and oversees a team of 15 lawyers across a 33 jurisdictions, providing both challenges and the ‘excitement’ that she feels when dealing with the ‘rich and diverse cultures’ across her work remit. When building her team, Au-Yong looked to reflect the company’s transnational scope in her team selection: ‘diversity was a huge priority that was really embraced’, she explains, ‘and we now have 12 nationalities and a balance of genders in the team’, which has had a huge positive impact on the team’s ‘range of perspectives’ on how to deal with challenges. Au-Yong’s versatility and depth of experience has been very useful when navigating the challenges faced by the business during her tenure, including the company’s expansion into adjacent markets, new geographies, re-deploying resources and changing into new operation models. Au-Yong is also heavily involved in the company’s transition to cloud-based operations, a complex task that has meant coordination across the business functions. Au-Yong is grateful for her time as an in-house counsel, which has provided ‘a more enriching experience’ than would have been the case had she stayed solely in private practice.