Event Report

Following the success of the inaugural Shanghai employment forum in 2018, The Legal 500 teamed up with the employment boutique firm River Delta Law Firm for a second consecutive year, and invited a range of multinational and domestic GCs as well as human resources directors to discuss the current trends and issues in the employment sphere. Jingbo Lu, director and chief partner of the firm, and senior partners Cathy Qu and Bella Bai participated in the discussion.

For this year’s event, the focus was on the latest developments in judicial enforcement of labour legislation in China and its impact on labour employment of enterprises. A further discussion point honed in on the importance of setting up a comprehensive compliance structure and the changing attitude in recognising the importance of compliance in domestic companies; dismissals; and trade secret protection.

The opening remarks from Lu covered nine aspects in the recent labour legislation development including increasing the supply of human resources, making flexible employment methods, enlarging the independent authority, protecting asset safety, controlling labour costs, coordinating the functions of union, regulating the behaviour of employee, unifying the application of law and optimizing the dispute resolution.

Qu discussed the common issues in corporate compliance management, spanning commercial bribery and unfair competition, protection of trade secrets, conflict of interest, personal information security and protection of privacy, discrimination and harassment in workplace; whilst Bai provided detailed definition of trade secrets, the way in which trade secrets are infringed, the transfer of duty of proof and new penalties under the background of the amendment of anti-unfair competition law.

When discussing non-competition in China, Bai covered compensation, exercising the right of contract termination and the consequences of breach of contract.

Over 50 GCs turned out to share best practice, gain new knowledge and ideas, and ask the market leading firms’ questions related to the points discussed during the forum.