About

The business of international fashion brand Ralph Lauren is ably assisted in the Asia Pacific countries by a legal team based in the region containing four lawyers, two paralegals and one assistant. Shih-Jern Liang, the international general counsel, manages a highly capable global legal department that covers the EMEA and Asia Pacific regions. Based in Hong Kong, Liang was hired by Ralph Lauren as the general counsel for the Asia Pacific region in June 2016, and was promoted to his current role in April 2017 and currently splits his time between Hong Kong and Geneva. The company’s Asia Pacific legal team is full of specialists; Andrew Lee covers general commercial and corporate matters, Makio Hayashi covers all legal matters within Japan,
Dennis To covers IP, brand enforcement, employment and litigation matters and Carson Chow covers real estate, store operation and certain commercial matters. Other than the Tokyo-based Hayashi, the team’s entire roster of lawyers and paralegals are based in Hong Kong, having all been hired in the last two years. When Liang joined in June 2016 all of the former lawyers had left, forcing him to hire an entirely new team and reorganise the work structure according to his vision. Since then, Ralph Lauren has embarked on an ambitious growth plan, particularly focused on Greater China, and aggressive brand enforcement steps. About this transformation, a nominating sources says: ‘When [Liang] joined the business, the Asia legal team had a big restructure months ago and it was [left] with nobody. Liang managed to rebuild the team from scratch in Asia, built the brand protection programme which wasn’t in place before, and managed to stop more than RMB24m revenue in China to be missed from counterfeiting products in 2017. In the past two years, he and his team supported very aggressive expansion in Asia, with more than 50 stores opened in two years’. In addition to this major role in opening over 50 new stores, the team has also been developing and executing a new brand enforcement strategy for the region that led to several favourable court decisions against counterfeiters and parallel importers of Ralph Lauren-branded products. Liang says the team’s success is due to it having a ‘united team mind-set with individual empowerment and accountability. The team adopts a very flat organisational structure – all team members have fostered close camaraderie amongst themselves and readily offer to help each other with work. Each lawyer is given a high degree of autonomy (with accountability) in handling work and dealing with the business teams’.