“In Kenya every year I have about 60 to 80 Chinese companies as my client in Kenya. So that’s the reason I can have an office in Nairobi Kenya. But for other countries nearby, for example, in Tanzania, I have four clients. And it also gives me a lot of very good legal fees and…
“For the Chinese law firms, the tax is really calculated based on their total fees without the deduction of the cost of their foreign counsel. So that the total cost that we will charge of our clients would be normally would be like 15% or 20% higher than to use the kind of alliances structure.”…
“If someone takes over the coordination in a difficult case with various jurisdictions, I support that, and I tell to my client, listen, this work is so important, has to be paid. So there must be a budget for the coordination only, especially if various jurisdictions are involved.” The Cost and Regulation Framework Peter Ruggle…
“At the centre of the network of the platform, it should be a centralised structure that can perform quality control, but this requires very skilled lawyers, of course, because they should be able to supervise the job done by the single lawyers in the various jurisdictions. This requires very good lawyers, very well-trained lawyers. And…
Opening Quote: “What kind of alternative model you choose depends on the costs. As a lawyer, we are also entrepreneurs. We have our employees, we have our cost at the end of the month. So we have to consider cost. And also the second point, we are working or living as a lawyer in a…
“From my perspective, I think to get the very interest and attention from a Chinese client is, you need to know the Chinese culture first, because we have a relationship first, business later. So it’s totally different between China and Europe. And Chinese clients want to know who you are before what you can do.”…
“If we just say, OK, referral case to the foreign lawyers, I think that is just a one-shot deal. It can’t really keep the long-term relationship between two law firms.” Hongxia Zhang‘s blunt assessment cuts through the comfortable fiction that many international and Chinese law firms maintain: that periodic referrals constitute meaningful collaboration. As a…
“From decades of working with Chinese clients, they generally want to know who you are first before what you can do. But I tend to group them into two. The first category are the ones who are SOEs, the ones with some state support. They have a slightly different approach than those who are not…
“From my experience, telling my Chinese potential clients or also counterparts in negotiation that I read the five great novels, great Chinese novels, and I appreciated them with appropriate quotation, it’s something that has facilitated me in creating this kind of trust, this kind of guanxi.” When Bernardo Cartoni shares this insight, he’s describing something…
“The Chinese client must first approach you. And to approach you, they will either have heard of you from somewhere or read about you in a directory or maybe heard of you from LexChina. But you have to go beyond just that referral. They come to you based on your reputation. And they now begin…