About

As chief legal and compliance officer at CLSA, Jaclyn Jhin leads a team of 13 lawyers in Hong Kong, working with four additional lawyers outside of Hong Kong to provide a global coverage. In the words of a nominator, the team ‘is widely recognised as commercially savvy and adept at providing sound, balanced legal advice in numerous different areas ranging from capital markets, mergers and acquisitions and corporate governance’. With most team members reporting directly to Jhin, the team has a lean, flat structure designed to serve the business and facilitate decision making. The legal team was instrumental in the integration of CLSA and CITIC Securities International, two major investment banks that form today’s CLSA. ‘We came up with a streamlined and rational structure for the integrated group, spanning over 20 cities across Asia Pacific, the US and Europe, and set up new group companies and effected ownership transfers between existing and new group companies’, says Jhin. In addition, with Hong Kong being the headquarters, the team guides the global business to comply with MiFID II, Dodd-Frank and other EU and US legislations, handling most major projects in-house with limited help from external counsel. CLSA is a major player in Hong Kong in terms of the number of deals it handles. The team has witnessed a soar in pipeline transactions since 2017 and has been particularly active in IPOs, equity derivatives and fixed income deals. With the legal team’s support, CLSA made several headlines and scored extremely well on various league tables. In 2018 alone, CLSA acted as a sponsor in 12 Hong Kong IPOs, ranking number two on the league table, missing out on the top spot by just one deal. Some of the headline transactions included the IPO of Xiaomi, Fosun Tourism’s Club Med and Hua Medicine. The legal team is also a pioneer in exploring innovative transaction structures, such as China Shipbuilding Industry Corp’s bonds exchangeable into the shares of Postal Savings Bank of China. ‘The structure was unique in that it satisfied the NDRC offshore debt quota requirement whilst not being consolidated into the financial statements of the special purpose vehicle’s direct shareholder. With this structure, the client was able to put into use the shares it had acquired in an equity investment without selling the shares and suffering a loss when the trading price of the shares was not satisfactory. Our team was deeply involved in designing the structure’, Jhin explains. Regarding the team ethos, she says: ‘Everyone should be accountable and get prepared for a general counsel role in the future. We believe a close-knit team of mature, high-calibre lawyers would deliver more than a large group of lawyers of multiple levels, each doing only “my part” and relying on “escalations” so that their manager would move things forward. When hiring for the team and at internal sharing sessions, the message is always to take the initiative and become accountable for one’s area, while being prepared to help with others and become versatile’.