According to the different stages of their own development, enterprises to find the most important compliance elements that should be paid attention to at present, this is the most important, do not think too much about the risks that have not yet occurred, do not worry about the sky, but also do not ignore the pain of the past.
It is more important to think about the problems that should be considered today, tomorrow has tomorrow's worries, tomorrow's compliance risks. Now many enterprises are very anxious about how to implement compliance and how to effectively prevent and control risks... The question lies here, what are the compliance elements you need now? Concentrate on solving this problem, this is the problem we should think about.
Wen | Dingyuan Jiali
Interview with | Dingyuan Jiali
Edited | Heshi
There is no shortage of extraordinary women in Chinese lawyers, and Li Ying is one of them.
Ying Li is the President of iLAW Compliance-Taizhou Branch, responsible for the Market Development and Product Development Business Committee, and the Director of Jiangsu Shengdian (Hangzhou) Law Firm.
2020 has been a tough year for many lawyers, but extraordinary women seem to have a trait that they are more willing to break the game with strength before the difficult situation.
In the year of the sudden outbreak of the epidemic, Ms. Li Ying initiated the organization of the online operation training of Shengdian Law Firm, and improved the online office, video conference work collaboration, project management and retrieval skills under the information system through 45 days of video conferencing.
In the intense training every day, Li Ying deeply feels the opportunities and challenges brought by the technical update to lawyers! After resuming work and production during the epidemic period, Li Ying immediately invested energy and planned to set up a branch of Jiangsu Shengdian Law Firm in Hangzhou, assisting Jiangsu Shengdian Law Firm to open a strategic layout for the integration of the general office.
Taking the Hangzhou branch as the experimental field, it began to focus on corporate compliance business, and improved the legal support service capability of "legal service + industrial chain" with technical application and professional research.
From "Lone Wolf" to "Platform"
In 2006, Li Ying, who passed the judicial examination, started as a paralegal and officially stepped into the legal profession. In 2020, she has transformed into the director of a Hangzhou law firm. 15 years of practice experience has witnessed the transformation of a young lawyer into a law firm director.
After graduating from the bachelor's degree in management, she always remembers the connotation of business management taught by her mentor, "Culture, Philosophy, and Law", and remembers the portrait of excellent enterprise managers mentioned in the tutor's lecture: First of all, the enterprise management technology with a sense of legal rules...
Because of her determination to inject the power of law into enterprise management, she was inspired to pass the four-month immersive legal study, pass the national judicial examination in one fell swoop, and deepen her research on business management theory in legal work.
In providing legal services for enterprises, we continue to study the legal theories and practical experience required by enterprises, and deeply appreciate the importance of industrialized legal services.
Dean Li Ying walked into the enterprise
Having just graduated from college, she had a passion for the legal profession and passed the judicial exam in just three months, thus starting her career as a lawyer.
At that time, she thought that by passing such a difficult qualification examination, she would be able to successfully become a lawyer.
But in fact, the simple word lawyer has made her take 15 years to truly understand the meaning, and the hardships and difficulties of the legal profession are no less than the entrepreneurship and prosperity of a company.
In the process, she has been thinking about the growth of lawyers and has her own unique perspective on this issue.
The growth of lawyers will definitely go through the entry stage, and it will take three years to start, and these three years cannot ask about the harvest, but we must set the direction. The next five years of independence, that is, the need to be an independent lawyer for five years.
After experiencing these, it is considered to have reached a crossroads in life, and you need to make your own choices, whether to become a "lone wolf" lawyer, fight alone, or choose to team up with other lawyers, or go to the platform to provide a cooperation platform for more lawyers.
"In fact, I crossed the stage of teamization and directly chose to be a platform lawyer from a "lone wolf"." Li Ying described herself this way.
"Law firms need to be managed more than companies served by lawyers. The transformation from focusing on providing legal services for enterprises to providing corporate management for law firms is a cycle and a growth!"
"When I joined The Holy Coden Law Firm and prepared to establish the Hangzhou branch, I hope to work with the head office to productize our legal services, build a legal service platform with the head office, and build the Holy Codex into a regional large-scale, professional and branded law firm in the Yangtze River Delta."
Long-term "companion" legal services
Times are constantly changing, and the legal services required by each era are also different.
After entering the legal industry, Li Ying has continuously explored the future direction, non-litigation business, litigation business have been tried, and the legal services provided have also involved many industries, such as pharmaceuticals, finance, automobiles and other years of service in different industries.
Since Li Ying entered the legal profession and was fortunate to provide legal services for a state-owned pharmaceutical enterprise, Li Ying has grown from a ignorant legal xiaobai to a senior legal person who is deeply involved in the pharmaceutical industry from the start-up to the prosperity of the company, and she hopes to continue to shield more enterprises in this industry.
"I was fortunate that when I first started working as a paralegal, I was able to provide relatively stable legal services to a state-owned enterprise, and the company recognized me.
I accompanied this company for 12 years, from scratch, until the successful listing of this company during the epidemic in 2020.
Dean Li Ying did compliance training for enterprises
This experience has allowed me to comprehensively see the application of law at different levels, different links and different periods from the perspective of the company, the perspective of operation, the perspective of capital, the perspective of science and technology, and the perspective of finance, and the company from the start-up period to the growth stage to the group stage, and finally to the listing, which requires many types of legal services."
Li Ying called it a long-term "accompanying" legal service. Witness a company grow from small to large, from single-line monomer to diversified group development.
She believes that in this process, lawyers need to constantly care about the legal services required by enterprises and constantly think about what risks enterprises will face.
No matter in which industry field, the essence of enterprise development is the same, with the growth of enterprises, in the face of complex and changeable phenomena, it is more necessary for lawyers to learn to see the essence through the phenomenon and think about how the law can help enterprises "bigger and stronger".
Enterprises want to "become bigger and stronger" and "bigger and stronger", and they are inseparable from compliance management.
As a lawyer who has been exposed to compliance business earlier, Li Ying also has her own unique understanding of compliance business.
The growth of legal practice has accompanied the growth of this pharmaceutical company, because its business involves many fields such as state-owned assets, pharmaceutical technology, international trade and equipment procurement, and as a state-controlled enterprise, it is in the strict compliance requirements of state-owned enterprises and state-owned enterprises by sasacous assets and group companies.
As early as 2014, Li Ying began to systematically learn to provide compliance services for enterprises, and gradually provided legal services for enterprises in other industries, always putting legal compliance operations in the core principles of corporate governance, once again helping the financial leasing business of the enterprises she served to flourish, and effectively resolving legal risks for the banks she served.
In order to more accurately grasp the pain points of corporate compliance service needs, Li Ying relied on her strong self-motivation to read a large number of compliance monographs and deepen her understanding of all levels of compliance.
"Compliance has existed for a long time, and as a state-owned enterprise, the company I provide legal services has some internal requirements for the construction of the compliance system, and at that time I also did a lot of compliance training for employees within the enterprise."
"Compliance is a management category, a field that combines management with a legal category, and it is a very large area. When it comes to compliance, there is another word, and that is risk.
From the perspective of risk management, the risk management of an enterprise is divided into many dimensions, including policy risk, market risk, legal risk, product risk, enterprise operation risk, financial risk and so on.
Like some companies also do international trade, which involves international treaties, the application of international laws, the compliance of international trading habits, which is the outermost;
The middle layer is also at the domestic level, and there are also many policies and legal compliance;
Finally, within the enterprise, there are internal control compliance and internal operation compliance. In summary, compliance can be divided into three levels." That's how she understands compliance.
As an early lawyer who entered the field of compliance practice, Li Ying's compliance practice team formed by her also followed the consistent tradition of "accompanying" legal services when providing legal services.
The name and portrait of their team is "operational think tank", which is a good interpretation of what a "think tank" that accompanies the growth of the enterprise should look like. She hopes to become a think tank for businesses.
The Operations Think Tank team provides compliance training to the business
For example, Buffett goes out to invest, in addition to money, but also accountants and lawyers. This also shows that there are at least three people in the company's think tank: those who can invest, those who do financial management, and those who understand the law.
The legal services she hopes to provide are compliance services that go deep into the industrial chain, which is a kind of "accompanying" compliance services that can penetrate into all aspects of the operation and management of enterprises. This not only needs to accompany the growth of the enterprise, but also a company and a solution.
There are no two leaves in the world, no two companies are the same, each company is a unique existence, and the compliance system cannot be copied from other companies.
"This requires our lawyers to reserve all kinds of knowledge in their brains, and when we face different operating models, different growth stages, and different key nodes of the enterprise, what are the compliance tools that can be matched to it in the first place?" What is the concept of compliance? What is the compliance implementation?"
This is the model led by Li Ying to provide compliance business for enterprises.
Enterprises do compliance, just like "fight Lego"
Although the provision of compliance legal services requires "one enterprise, one solution", it is necessary to provide exclusive compliance services according to the different characteristics of enterprises.
However, Li Ying also agrees that no matter the attributes of the industry, no matter what stage of development it is in, there is a certain commonality in the construction of the overall compliance system of the enterprise.
She used a very vivid metaphor, she feels that the construction of the compliance system is like a Lego toy, the compliance element is every LEGO brick, the compliance element is common, but the combination is not the same, and the compliance system is different.
The difficulty lies in how to flexibly organize various elements, which requires mastering each compliance element. From the perspective of the enterprise, it is necessary to know oneself and know the other in order to win every battle.
"You must be very familiar with the enterprise, you must know it well, how many people are in the enterprise?" What is it for? What is the future of the industry? What happened to other companies in the same industry? What happened to the industry as a whole? What is the macro environment on which the industry depends? What about macro policies?
Under the premise of being familiar with your own enterprise, to learn the compliance elements step by step and in modules, when you understand both your own enterprise and the compliance elements necessary for compliance management, this time the compliance program that is exclusive to the enterprise comes out.
According to the different stages of their own development, enterprises to find the most important compliance elements at this stage, which is the most important, do not think too much about the risks that have not yet occurred, do not worry about the sky, but do not ignore the pain of the past.
It is more important to think about the problems that should be considered today, tomorrow has tomorrow's worries, tomorrow's compliance risks.
Now many companies are very anxious about how to implement compliance and how to effectively prevent and control risks... The question lies here, what are the compliance elements you need now? Concentrate on solving this problem, this is the problem we should think about."
I prefer to be a "knowledge communicator"
At the end of the interview, when talking about life planning and life value, Li Ying smiled and said, "I think I am actually a person who aspires to do education."
Li Ying feels that she has more plans for life, although she is working as a lawyer at this stage, she believes that the work of a lawyer is also to spread knowledge, and she is doing her best to pass on knowledge.
Many friends around her describe her like this, she is very knowledgeable, understands a lot of knowledge, and has mastered all aspects of skills. Friends were all curious, wondering why she knew so much.
She believes that because she likes to acquire knowledge, she likes to try to get more useful knowledge to others within her own ability, and then spread this knowledge to those who need it.
Dean Ying Li participated in the iCourt U.S. study tour
"I also said in the team training that if we want to continuously discover knowledge, we must explore meta-knowledge under the premise of our ability.
The mastery of meta-knowledge is very important, because I can't go to the same place, otherwise I will lose the value of knowledge transfer."
She has always felt that although she is engaged in law, the essence of education is actually love. This is also her reflections on her work.
Many people may think that the profession of lawyers is too rational and rigid. Li Ying will wonder, how can legal services have vitality, more tension, more warmth? How to achieve rigidity and softness?
So she has also been trying to express herself in a more visual way, a more acceptable way for the other party, and sometimes to give people time and space to think, until one day he himself understands that this knowledge is very important, let him slowly understand.
"When I'm 75 years old, I might go to college to give lectures, tell people about my experience as a lawyer for half a century, observe the world from my point of view, share my 50 years of time, and look at a social phenomenon through legal thinking." 」 This is also her ideal after the age of 75.
From the personal growth of lawyers, to the development of the law firm's compliance business, to the construction of the corporate compliance system, in the hour-long interview, Li Ying always maintained a clear logic and told every story in her lawyer's practice career in a telling way.
Years are equal fairness to anyone, and the girl who once dreamed of carrying a pen to the end of the world still retains that original heart.
Just a few days ago, Li Ying excitedly told me that she was going to prepare a book, hoping to summarize the compliance content of the pharmaceutical industry, and to change the words every day.
I can't help but think that I have the answer to the question of "how long do you have to hold on", the road is under your feet, just bravely go forward, to feel the road, and when you turn back, you will see the rainbow behind you after the rain.
"China Compliance Lawyers" is a new section launched by iLAW Compliance. We hope to find the best solutions and service models for corporate compliance business from the experience of Chinese compliance lawyers. This column will contain interviews and interpretations of compliance lawyers across the country, and more compliance lawyers are welcome to join us.
In the face of the turbulent storms of the world, we hope that this place is not part of the wind and rain, but an umbrella. The abilities we have improved together, the methods we have learned, and the storms we have experienced are enough to make this umbrella, calmly and unshakably protectIng China's compliance lawyers and enterprises, they will grow into a better appearance.
You have your sea of stars, and I stand on the shore and watch you embark on your journey. Please submit or communicate with the editor-in-chief by private message.