About

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years? I handled an asset deal as a type of M&A transaction between Kemira and Shandong Tiancheng Wanfeng Chemical Technology. A joint venture has been established to purchase key assets from Tiancheng Wanfeng. The joint venture mainly produces AKD wax and its key raw material fatty acid chloride, thus strengthening Kemira’s position as the global leader in the pulp and paper industry and supporting the growth of water treatment. The initial closing happened in November 2018. The target timing to achieve the interim closing and the second closing is the fourth quarter of 2019. We also established a joint venture with a Korean chemical company in Ulsan, Korea in January 2019. The joint venture will produce chemicals used for retention and drainage in packaging and paper production, as well as in wastewater treatment and in sludge dewatering. I also dealt with a dispute resolution in India. We won an arbitration proceeding in June 2019 and thus solved the long lasting dispute with a former local partner of a joint venture in India.

You started accumulating in-house legal experience at an early stage of your career,
why did you choose to work in-house at the time?

During the third year of my LL.M. degree, I worked as an intern at Shanghai Science and Technology Investment Corporation and participated in several large foreign investment projects. I started to find my interest in the pursuit of practising law in the areas of corporate and foreign investment. When the job opportunity with Shanghai Philips Semiconductor was in front of me, I took it without hesitation.

What are the unique challenges, if any, of working in-house for a foreign multinational in China? It becomes one of the biggest challenges for multinational chemical companies to comply with the evolving and tighter laws and regulations governing environmental protection and production safety in China. The legal department has to be sophisticated to embrace this challenge and ensure the company’s full compliance.

What will be the main focus for the company in the next 12 months and how do you intend to assist with this? To manage and achieve a successful M&A integration: organise and prioritise resources of the legal department, including setting specific objectives, creating an execution plan and cooperating closely with business segments and other functions, to integrate operational and cultural practices and streamline the organisation and processes.

To help sales teams achieve more with less. The legal department will support the sales force to withdraw from low-margin businesses, and increase high-margin sales revenue, including but not limited to the amendment or termination of existing sales agreements, and drafting and negotiating new sales contracts.

What is currently missing from law firm services that would benefit their corporate clients? Understand the client’s business and industry at the law firm’s own expense, identify the client’s needs and provide tailor-made legal advice.   FOCUS ON… Nowadays the global regulatory and compliance environment is changing dramatically, while technology is developing very fast. To echo these changes and developments, general counsel have to be better and do more to succeed in this evolving environment, they should play a more active role than ever in the legal ecosystem. Companies expect general counsels to contribute more to the table in addition to their legal expertise. To be legal and business advisors: General counsel have to be both legal and business advisors to the companies. A general counsel’s provision of service needs to be improved with an increasing level of business acumen. The more a general counsel knows and learns about the business and the industries, the better they perform as legal and business advisors, they can advise companies in the context of business issues and not act merely as traditional legal advisors. A general counsel’s legal expertise together with knowledge of their corporations and industries make them strategists, they can think strategically and bring both legal and business knowledge, adding more value to the business. To take full advantage of technology: Technology is changing the legal landscape. In order to manage across a global environment and be business leaders, general counsel should take full advantage of technology. Use of technology can not only make legal departments work more effectively, but also make it more convenient for business colleagues
and other functions to cooperate with legal,
allowing business and other functions’ requests
for legal support to be much more handy and quicker.

To do pro bono: It’s often the case that law firm attorneys and non-profit attorneys participate in pro bono matters. Not so many in-house counsels are involved in pro bono work. We should encourage corporate citizens to find a new way to give back to the communities in which they live and work through participation in pro bono work. As long as companies take active steps to engage and volunteer, in-house counsels will be more interested in doing pro bono. To care for the growth of young in-house counsels: General counsel should be congratulated, since they have achieved success and have climbed high up the corporate counsel career ladder. In today’s complex and competitive environment, young in-house counsel are experiencing growing pains, and general counsel should care for the growth of young counsel in their legal teams. In addition, general counsel can act as keynote speakers at seminars, telling younger counsel what lessons should be learned, what experience should be listened to, and sharing practical tips with young counsel. In this way, these young counsel in or outside these legal teams can grow faster and in a more steady way. To drive changes for law firms: Given the world has changed, new technology has popped up and law firms have to know more about industries and possess better legal skills and do more to succeed in this evolving environment. However, for the purpose of saving costs, normally law firms are unwilling to embrace new technology, and their pace at adopting new technology and tools is very slow. In this regard, we can say corporate legal departments are in a good position to even force law firms to behave differently, otherwise, law firms won’t change. So, general counsel can play an active role to push law firms to move forward and be adaptive to the advancement of technology.