Team size:  10
  Career Biography

Ye Yi is currently the Senior Legal and Government Affairs Director at Guangzhou Tantu Network Technology Co., Ltd. She holds a Master’s degree in Law from China University of Political Science and Law and a Master’s in Business Administration from Sun Yat-sen University, combining a solid legal foundation with a diverse management perspective.

With over twenty years of experience in the legal field, she has a career that spans top-level law firm practices and leading corporate legal management. Early in her career, she practiced at the Shenzhen branch of Zhong Lun Law Firm in Beijing, focusing on core areas such as corporate investment and financing, mergers and acquisitions, and A-share listings. She represented institutions such as China Resources Group and Dachen Venture Capital in major capitalprojects andd handled civil and commercial litigation and arbitration cases for entities such as the Shenzhen Municipal Bureau of Land Resources and the Bank of China, establishing her professional reputation in the industry.

After transitioning to in-house corporate legal work in 2014, she has spent a decade deeply engaged in the internet industry, accurately overseeing e-commerce and content industry logic. During her tenure at Vipshop, she actively participated in the legislation of the “E-commerce Law” and the formulation of regulations by the State Administration for Market Regulation, leading the development of several national standards as a member of the E-commerce Committee of the China National Standardization Committee. At Alibaba Digital Entertainment Group, she was heavily involved in compliance management for games, videos, and other content, including virtual property compliance and risk management, strengthening the compliance framework.

In her current role, she has built a compliance system for e-commerce and fast-moving consumer goods brands and a government-business liaison network, expanding across legal, government relations, and audit supervision domains, providing comprehensive support for the group’s development.

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

Centering on the core needs of the e-commerce ecosystem, I led the team to build an integrated IP protection system with “full-platform search – AI infringement identification – automated complaints – enhanced enforcement”. Its systematic operation has effectively reduced infringement risks for the group’s multiple brands, cut counterfeiting losses of innovative products, helped maintain core customers and pricing power, boosted competitiveness, stabilised market share, and created substantial commercial value for the group.

Post-implementation, the system not only raised the efficiency of handling infringement links by 200% for the group’s brands, but also significantly improved traffic conversion rates. After internal validation, it has been promoted to sister companies in the group and enterprises in industrial clusters, covering three core sectors: apparel, daily chemicals, and food. It has cumulatively helped partners handle over 10,000 product links and short video infringement links.

Looking ahead, we will advance the system’s commercialisation, aiming to cover over 100 brand enterprises by 2026. This will assist more enterprises in AI-driven, efficient IP protection, provide a replicable solution for industry-wide brand rights safeguarding, and contribute to a healthy e-commerce IP ecosystem.

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

As the legal head of a brand Group company, my team and I focus on two key approaches to handle legal matters and safeguard the organisation’s resilience during periods of instability or crisis.

Firstly, leveraging AI as a technical pillar to build an efficient “pre-crisis early warning + in-crisis response” system.

We prioritise AI tools to streamline the full legal risk prevention and control process. On one hand, AI monitors real-time legal and regulatory developments across markets, cutting manual tracking costs by 60% and identifying earlier than traditional methods, securing advance time for crisis response. On the other hand, when crises occur (e.g. large-scale patent infringement), AI automatically categorises cases by “risk level and jurisdiction,” reducing the team’s time spent on administrative tasks. This allows our professionals to focus on high-priority issues, delivering the dual value of “technology-driven efficiency and professional focus.”

Secondly, we take “industry insights + legal expertise + external resources” as the collaborative core to build a new legal-business team with 1+1+1 > 3 synergy

Facing emerging challenges, we go beyond internal capabilities and proactively integrate multi-dimensional resources. Based on in-depth understanding of industry trends, combined with the team’s experience in legal compliance and patent layout, we accurately identify core risks. We also fully engage external resources, such as industry associations, specialised law firms, and IP regulatory authorities. Through resource sharing and joint analysis, we turn “industry insights,” “professional expertise,” and “external support” into complementary advantages. For example, when addressing cross-regional patent disputes, we use industry insights to anticipate opponents’ strategies, rely on professional expertise to develop enforcement plans, and leverage external institutions to quickly access local regulatory resources. This ultimately creates problem-solving capabilities far exceeding those of a single team, enabling us to efficiently overcome emerging challenges that traditional legal models struggle with.

What strategies do you employ to ensure the successful digital transformation of a legal department while maintaining compliance with your country’s data protection laws? 

On the premise of strictly complying with the country’s data protection laws, we have advanced the digital transformation of the legal department through a three-step strategy of “category-specific breakthroughs + technical collaboration + methodology consolidation”. The specific approach is as follows:

First, we took “classification of legal work scenarios” as the starting point to tackle the challenges of AI tool implementation one by one. We first decomposed legal affairs into core modules such as “intellectual property protection”, “contract management” and “compliance review”, and matched legal AI tools to address the pain points of each module. For example, in the field of intellectual property, to solve the low efficiency of identifying infringing products and short videos, we introduced AI tools with “image-based image search” and “frame-by-frame video comparison” technologies to accurately locate infringing content. In contract management, we used AI to organise common clauses in standard contracts and automatically match clause adaptation and modification plans under different cooperation conditions, eliminating repetitive manual work. Before the launch of each tool, we worked with the compliance team to review data processing procedures to ensure compliance with the data protection law’s requirements for “data collection, use and storage”, thus avoiding compliance risks from the source.

Second, we focused on “trial-and-error optimisation + technical collaboration” to build customised AI capabilities adapted to the enterprise. Instead of simply using off-the-shelf AI products on the market, we explored optimisation directions through trial and error. When we found that the functions of existing AI products deviated from the company’s needs, we took the initiative to collaborate with the internal technical team: on the one hand, we fed back the pain points of using the tools in legal scenarios (such as insufficient accuracy in contract clause recognition); on the other hand, we jointly iterated the functions, such as training AI to recognise the clause logic of the company’s exclusive cooperation models. Finally, we “internally integrated” scattered AI tools into an AI agent adapted to the company’s business, which not only retains the versatility of the tools but also enhances their relevance to the enterprise’s legal scenarios.

Third, we aimed at “methodology consolidation” to solidify the transformation results and quantify the value. Through the practice of the first two steps, we summarised a digital transformation methodology of “scenario classification → tool adaptation → trial-and-error optimisation → collaborative customisation”. At present, this system has played a stable role: it has not only enabled the legal department to achieve AI coverage in core tasks such as intellectual property infringement identification and contract processing, but also improved the overall work efficiency by about 40%. Meanwhile, we have strictly complied with the data protection law throughout the process without any compliance risks, truly realising the dual achievement of “compliance and efficiency”.

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

I am passionate about outdoor hiking and have helped establish a hiking alliance consisting of in-house legal counsel and lawyers. We regularly make plans to venture into the mountains and wilderness. One of my most memorable experiences was venturing deep into the remote and pristine Biluo Snow Mountain in Yunnan: beneath my feet was a path carpeted with moss and wildflowers; above me, snow-capped peaks were shrouded in mist; and in my ears, there was the sound of flowing streams and rustling vegetation. This kind of natural beauty — felt with my own hands and seen with my own eyes — made me deeply realise that “life is worth cherishing” and “the world is worth loving.” It also gave those of us who spend most days immersed in legal clauses a softer, more profound understanding of “people” and “life”.

It is precisely because of the encounters during these hikes that we have gradually extended this passion into small-scale public welfare efforts: during our hikes, we pick up litter left along the way; after each trip, we send books to the mountain-area students we meet on our journeys, and pool money to buy supplies for the villagers in nearby communities. This is not about deliberately “doing charity”; it is simply that we want to use our modest efforts to make others’ lives a little easier.

Recently, I have had a bold idea: in the next  year, I want to set aside one to three months specifically to go deep into the remote areas of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan provinces. In collaboration with local education authorities, I hope to bring “legal education support” to rural schools. Those of us who serve as chief legal officers in large companies spend our days supporting business and capital, and we are accustomed to using the law to ensure transaction security and mitigate commercial risks. But I have always believed that the law should not be a tool “exclusive to business”; it should be a “protective umbrella” for every ordinary person. I want to tell the children and villagers there what basic rights they have, how to protect themselves with the law when facing difficulties, and also help them understand that “the law has warmth, but also boundaries” — so they learn to respect rules and avoid breaking the law out of ignorance.

For me, outdoor hiking has allowed me to see the breadth of the world, while this vision of “legal education support” comes from a desire to let my professional expertise reach warmer, more underserved corners of society. This is not some grand ambition; it is simply that, as a legal professional, I want both my passion and my expertise to hold a little more “human-centric” value.