What’s the development and changes in the current e-commerce industry? What are the future trends? What’s the impact of these development, changes and trends on the future architecture and working mode of the corporate legal team? How does the legal team give support internally and provide services externally?

On June 9, 2017, Ms Long Yu, the Chief HR Officer and general counsel of JD.COM, led her legal team to gather together with the legal elites in the Salon of Legal Guru Club and carried out in-depth discussion and sharing regarding the current industry trends and the layout of legal department according to such trends.

Ms Long Yu delivered a highly informative speech on the future layout of legal department in the context of industry development and corporate strategy.

To a certain extent, the development trend of the Internet e-commerce industry guides a company to consider the development strategy and to plan the future layout of legal department. Ms Long Yu elaborated on the development, changes and future trends of the profession from the perspectives of technology leading, customer orientation and empowerment & openness. She pointed out that various technologies were changing all aspects of our work and life nowadays, and the product leading and trend leading were being transformed to the technology leading. At the 2017 annual conference of JD.COM, Mr. Liu Qiangdong, the CEO of JD.COM, clearly stated that JD would be transformed to a technology company in the next 12 years by two phases, which are “technology retail” – technology-driven retail, and “retailed technology” with a large number of retail scenarios catalyzing their technology products. Such transformation is not only about business, but more about mode, thought and thinking. Madam Long proposed that empowerment and openness were very critical for all the functional departments of a company. If a company fails to implement empowerment & openness and achieve large scale, some of the functions may be replaced by machines or systems until they disappear. This is also a future development and trend of the functional departments in many large companies.

For a company with a huge volume which desires to win in the future, it shall focus on the development trend of the industry, re-develop the planning and carry out long-term layout, so as to seize the opportunities and win in the future. JD.COM is also carrying out a series of strategic layout.

Jiao Jiao, the vice president of the legal department of JD.COM, shared her personal experience based on the specific practice of the legal department of JD.COM.

The four directions of layout of the corporate legal department have inherent logical relationships. Among them, informationization is the system, the bottom layer and the foundation, the talent intelligentization is about people, the legal influence ecologicalization is about what to do, and the service platformization is about the future. As a whole, it is about what kind of people to do what kind of things with what kind of basic and fundamental technologies and move to what kind of future.

Finally, the guests and the JD legal team exchanged practice and experience in their careers with each other in the Q&A part.