Beijing, China (PressExposure) July 07, 2009 -- "China Journal of Corporate Counsel" recently sat down with Edward Lehman, Managing Director of Lehman, Lee & Xu to gain his insights into how the role of in-house counsel has evolved over the past twenty years.
Edward Lehman commented that "when I came out here more than twenty years ago, the legal profession was not very developed, all law firms were essentially arms of the government, and companies generally did not use attorneys, let alone employee them as in-house counsel. That has certainly changed over the past ten years or so.
Today, corporate counsel are part of the senior management of most companies and are consulted on almost every major decision, whether it be a mergers and acquisitions transaction, drafting routine contracts, or formulating labor and employment policies. However, most attorneys in the corporate counsel's office are unlikely to be experts in all areas of the law and routinely require the assistance of law firms. For example, our firm works extremely closely with the in-house counsel of some of the largest foreign, Chinese, and state-owned companies.
While the in-house counsel may advise generally on a M&T transaction, corporate attorneys in law firms continue to give specific advice on any given project. While in-house counsel may draft a company's employment hand-book or draft a company's labor contracts, the litigation specialist within the firm must be consulted when a specific employee must be terminated or if a dispute proceeds to labor arbitration or to the courts. While the role of in-house counsel has certainly evolved and expanded over the years, we have seen an even closer cooperation between our client's in-house counsel and our firm's attorneys."
Lehman, Lee & Xu is a prominent Chinese corporate law firm and trademark and patent agency with offices throughout all mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Mongolia. The firm has been recognized as one of the top trademark firms in China by several intellectual property magazines and is managed by Mr. Edward E. Lehman, a leading expert on corporate law with 20 years of practice experience in mainland China.