“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…