The Voice of General Counsel
Fu Tong, General Counsel and Vice President, Qihoo 360;
Shawn Zhao, Vice President & Greater China General Counsel, China Hewlett-Packard Co., Ltd.
Xu Yongjian, General Counsel, China National Aviation Fuel Group Corporation
Urgent and important problem faced by all legal leaders:
- How to optimize the internal legal team structure;
- How to maximize the effect of a limited budget.
Many factors to consider when choose external lawyers:
- Professional ability;
- Docking of technology and company legal staff;
- The level of cultural identity;
- How to protect secrets of the company or avoid conflicts of interests?
- Understanding problems and difficulties of the legal staff in the company;
- How to provide added value to the company legal staff?
I would like to share with 6 things I like and 6 things I do not like about lawyers:
6 things I do not like:
- Obey professional ethics and professional rules; use unreasonable ways to solve disputes and customer;
- Agreed all the requirements, but cannot finish them;
- Too cautious, irresponsible. Vague and unclear of the legal opinion conclusion;
- Additional contract costs;
- Do not submit reports on time;
- Casually dressed, flirtatious.
6 things I like:
- There is a certain history and scale of the law firm with good reputation and record;
- Team structure maintains a relatively stable and reasonable situation. The team should have a senior partner, lawyers, and assistant;
- The lawyer has profound theoretical knowledge and rich practical experience. Know the law, understand business and our enterprise;
- The law firm should have powerful integration ability, organization and coordination ability;
- Communicate smoothly without language barriers;
- Providing latest consultation, system training, and other value-added services.
The requests for litigation lawyers:
- Understand product;
- Understand business model;
- Understand dispute background;
- Macroscopic angle to observe disputes;
- Resolve the problem. Be responsible for the results with the legal department.
Legal risk control is more important than litigation.
- First, we should have good professional skills.
- Second, be responsible for the results with the legal department.
The Voice of the Lawyer
He Li, Partner, Davis Polk & Wardwell
Wang Ningling, Partner, Finnegan Henderson
Why do I envy these general counsels in companies? There are two reasons:
(1) General counsel has a rich insight;
(2) General counsel make decisions, while external lawyers provide suggestion for reference. This is a common knowledge in my head.
Why do the envy feeling disappear sometimes?
(1) In terms of the same widespread problems, general counsel needs to learn, understand and master a lot of things in a very short period of time. It is a challenges for the personal ability;
(2) General counsel needs to take a lot of risk.
From this point of view, if you want to be a good external lawyers, you should:
(1) find yourself first, understand the law and related procedures;
(2) understand what is the overall goal of your clients and related products and its meaning according to the customers industry.
(3) understand the customer’s internal processes is also very important.
I want to make a brief introduction to the Finnegan Henderson. We are specialized in intellectual property law. We established the headquarter in 2008 and the representative office founded in Shanghai. In the seven years, we have a lot of cooperation with many Chinese companies, including Xiaomi Tech, Sinopec, Sinochem International and so on.
Firstly: we have professional lawyers who can help enterprises to solve problems. In terms of technical background, 90% of the lawyer in Finnegan Henderson have technical background. We not only work with legal personnel, but also work with the technical teams.
Secondly. Communication. President Zhao just said the ability of integration. This can help us to communicate with Chinese companies.
Thirdly, the division of responsibilities in the company and the importance of added value.
