About

In a number of ways, Denise Ho’s background made her an ideal candidate to set up the legal function for Tesla’s operations in Hong Kong. Firstly, although she always coveted a legal career, she actually qualified as chartered accountant with Ernst & Young in Berlin and her native Vancouver. This, she says, was a ‘great formative experience’ for her later in-house career, especially when it is often assumed by businesspeople that their legal staff may not share their gift for numbers; ‘the joke is’, she relates, ‘that lawyers can’t count’. Secondly, she is proficient in both English and Cantonese, which made her an ideal go between for the Hong Kong office and Tesla’s headquarters in the United States. Finally, while practicing with Shearman & Sterling, Ho amassed a wealth of experience in M&A transactions, a purposely-chosen speciality as this would have the most relevance to a later career as an in-house counsel. Tesla, a pioneer of electric car technology, recognised all of these stellar attributes and more – trusting her abilities would allow her to succeed in setting up the company’s Hong Kong legal team. This required Ho to go ‘from being specialised in M&A to being a generalist in-house lawyer’. Tesla’s foresight in appointing Ho has paid dividends as her tenure has seen its Hong Kong operation expand from being seen as ‘an electric car company to a tech company that happens to make electric cars’. Ho works very closely with local regulators and this takes up a large proportion of her workload, simply because many Tesla products are so cutting-edge that they do not have precedents and are ‘always outpacing regulation’. This means creative solutions must be found by Ho, who is always keen to be a ‘business enabler’ to empower the management to realise their ambitions. Ho believes this to be the key task of in-house counsel, who should be ‘open minded about taking risks’ so that they can give useful advice rather than being a team that ‘just say no’.