Legal Director | TAL Education Group
Lan Zhang
Legal Director | TAL Education Group
What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?
Firstly, during a period of significant industry adjustment, my team led a series of compliance initiatives aligned with the deepening implementation of regulatory policies. This was not merely routine adjustment but a systematic restructuring of the operational models and contractual frameworks for our core product lines. This ensured the continuous and lawful operation of our primary businesses under the new regulatory environment, safeguarding a stable service experience for our vast user base.
Secondly, we provided end-to-end legal support for the company’s strategic pivot towards new areas such as educational technology solutions and smart hardware. From conducting compliance assessments for new business models and facilitating partner negotiations, to securing critical operational licenses and drafting comprehensive commercial agreements, the legal team was deeply embedded in the entire process, ensuring legal considerations were integral from proof-of-concept to commercial scale-up.
Furthermore, amidst complexities arising from business realignments, we formulated and executed precise litigation strategies. These efforts successfully recovered substantial financial losses for the company in areas such as property leases and supplier contracts, thereby protecting corporate assets and providing crucial support for a stable operational transition.
How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?
During periods of uncertainty, we primarily build organisational legal resilience through the following approaches.
We have established a dynamic regulatory monitoring system covering areas such as education, technology, data, and advertising. This system regularly generates “Risk Radar” reports for management and business units, helping the company anticipate regulatory trends and prepare proactively.
During business transformations, we are deeply involved in the legal feasibility assessment of new business models, ensuring all new initiatives are built on a solid legal foundation. Simultaneously, through prudent management of key contracts and supplier relationships, we safeguard business continuity.
For potential legal disputes, regulatory inquiries, or escalated user complaints, we have developed standardised emergency response legal procedures. This ensures the legal team can immediately intervene during crises and provide precise, unified legal guidance to control the situation effectively.
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?
Yes, AI has brought not only efficiency improvements but also transformative changes to our work model. Over the past year, we have progressed from using AI to the stage of building AI agents.
We independently developed an AI contract review agent and integrated it into our business processes, achieving automatic preliminary screening and risk identification for high-volume contracts. At the same time, we established a 24/7 online legal advisory assistant and data compliance assistant, enabling business personnel to input scenarios and receive automated diagnostic reports and actionable recommendations, effectively preventing compliance vulnerabilities at the source.
What I find most rewarding in this AI-driven technological revolution is the AI mindset, technical understanding, and productisation capabilities that our legal team has cultivated throughout this journey.
What is a cause, business or otherwise, that you are passionate about? Why is this?
I have a sincere passion for leveraging technology to empower educational equity, and I hope that the work I am currently engaged in can become a pivotal driving force in realising this vision. For example, by establishing strong and reliable legal and compliance frameworks, we can ensure that advanced educational technologies are deployed safely, in compliance, and at scale to benefit a broader population, especially those in under-resourced communities.
