About

Theo Pang, current vice president and general counsel for Asia Pacific at American clothing manufacturer VF Corporation, has worked in a variety of interesting and high profile roles across a 24 year career that has seen him move frequently between jurisdictions, practice areas and in-house and private practice roles. After qualifying in London, Pang moved back to Hong Kong and a role with Baker McKenzie before pursuing an in-house role with Morgan Stanley as an online trading counsel. This, a brand new role at the time, saw Pang picked ahead of a large number other applicants and was a major coup for him personally, though it was cut short when the dot com bubble burst in the late 1990s. Via a partner role at Bird & Bird’s Beijing office and a move back in-house at Mattel, Pang then moved into his current role at VF Corporation (VFC). Pang praises the ‘great personal development’ that he has been able to achieve while here, and is proud of the significant improvements he has made to the legal team’s reputation and internal efficiency. Despite operating in Asia for over two decades, VFC did not have an in-house legal function before Pang arrived, and he was even regarded with apprehension by some businesspeople who assumed the legal team would be a preventative rather than a supportive force. A testament to his excellent interpersonal skills, Pang successfully ‘changed the perspective of the staff’ by building trust through successful cooperation on their projects. This achievement has been recognised by the upper management of the company, and Pang is now part of the executive management team for Asia Pacific, based on his sharing of ‘the values and culture’ of the company. Pang has also ensured that the whole company has advanced leaps and bounds with their use of technology. Among other initiatives, Pang has been responsible for ‘setting up e-platforms to trade with VFC’s vendors in the region and house all documents in Asia’ and has also contributed to ‘a new mindset’ throughout the company in regards to the use of technology internally. When summing up how to be successful in the in-house legal world, Pang is sure that ‘soft skills’, interpersonal and cooperative ones, play a large role. ‘As an in-house counsel’, he explains, ‘you are a cost centre rather than a profit centre’, meaning that they must be able to get their business partners to ‘open up’ about their business issues so they can be resolved cooperatively.