About

Educated both in China and the United States, Len Ding has accumulated professional experience from large multinational corporations, including ArcelorMittal, Michelin and Philips, and from international law firm Simmons & Simmons’ Shanghai office. It was while with ArcelorMittal in 2005 that Ding was first given the opportunity to lead a legal department, a milestone that he picks as a particular career highlight and which allowed him to mould a team around his own concept of what a legal department should embody. Since 2014, Ding been general counsel at Kemira, a Finnish chemical company. During a busy time for the company, Ding has ‘set up Kemira legal entities’ in Japan and Thailand, taken part in the restructuring of the existing Indonesian and South Korean entities of the business, and provided advice and guidance during the ‘acquisition of Akzo Nobel’s global Paper & Pulp Chemicals Segment and the post-M&A integration’. Internally, Ding has made notable improvements to contract management throughout the company. An increased monitoring of contracts has meant that ‘the number of legal proceedings has decreased year-by-year dramatically’. Ding emphasises the importance of maintaining a business mind-set when operating as a corporate counsel, stating that ‘knowledge of law is not enough’ and that individuals looking to get ahead in the industry should ‘well understand’ the business in order to provide advice that is ‘compliant, practical and business-oriented’. While the legal team has made a huge contribution to Kemira’s recent successes, Ding believes that businesses in China and Hong Kong could benefit from an increased prominence of the in-house legal role as a whole, and he seeks to ‘further enhance the positive image’ of this in the future.