About

Donny Ching was appointed legal director of Royal Dutch Shell in 2014 and is responsible for legal services, intellectual property services and compliance matters. Ching graduated with a law degree from the University of Southampton in the UK and was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 1988. He joined Shell in Australia in the same year and re-qualified as a lawyer in Victoria, Australia, in 1989. He worked initially in the resources business before moving on to downstream and corporate work in Shell Australia. ‘The main highlight has been the opportunity to work in so many different businesses and countries while remaining in one company. This breadth for experience has been critical in helping me lead a global team in almost 50 countries around the world’, explains Ching. In 1992, he moved to Shell Hong Kong to work on the Nanhai petrochemicals project in China, as well as other smaller joint ventures and projects that marked Shell’s re-entry into China. In 2000, he moved to London in the UK where he first worked on some chemical divestments before moving to support Shell’s then gas and power business. He helped to set up Shell’s global liquefied natural gas (LNG) trading business and worked on major projects such as Pearl GTL in Qatar. Ching moved to Singapore in 2004 as Associate general counsel for the gas and power business in the Asia Pacific region. His role included supporting Shell’s growing LNG trading business and LNG projects in Russia and Australia. In 2008, Ching became head of legal for Shell Singapore, responsible for legal support to the downstream business in South-east Asia. He became general counsel of projects and technology and moved to The Hague in June 2011. Ching has just stepped down from the executive committee of the GC100 and is a member of Lex Mundi’s Client Advisory Council and of the advisory board of the Transforming Women’s Leadership in the Law programme sponsored by Thomson Reuters. ‘I am very passionate about diversity and inclusion and I believe this is a core strength for Shell legal given the diversity of our internal business partners and external customers and stakeholders. More recently, I have teamed up with a number of other general counsel in the European general counsel community to work on improving gender diversity in our external law firms which overall is really very poor’, says Ching.