Staying Ahead of the Game – One Law Firm's WINning Strategy

“Asia is a fast changing business environment. As legal service providers, you need time to think, you need time to implement, you need time to understand the regulations, and in-house teams do not have the time and resources to do that,” said Rivers. “And our WIN program is essentially aimed at helping our clients to their job as a value add.”

WIN is designed to support in-house counsel across their total business needs – practical, legal and otherwise.

“We live in an interfacing international environment,” said Rivers. “I'm an English lawyer who moved to this part of the world, and the way business is done in China is completely different. The way I scaled up was to sit down a group of Chinese lawyers, and ask them how it is done, and that is what WIN offers – somebody there to answer questions that have been asked before.”

Rivers outlined the various needs of in-house counsel, based on the feedback they have received, and they include legal business needs, technical business needs, commercial business needs, personal needs – such as people management, talent management, stress management, soft skills – such as persuasion and negotiation skills, and operational requirements needs.

“We are able to provide our clients with a support network, and organize information or data for our clients as a value-added offering, and that's going to be a differentiation factor for us as a law firm, with a little bit of giving back,” she said.

The Asia program was launched this month with an event in Hong Kong that gathered about 100 in-house lawyers for a session on Confidence. A team of in-house lawyers from HSBC who attended the session on Confidence shared that WIN was a welcomed program, and it was great to be included as part of the legal community, as legal counsel often feel their specific needs are sidelined in big corporations. They said they are looking forward to attending more events such as these, and that it also provided a great networking platform among in-house lawyers from other organizations.

“People often question what confidence looks like in Asia – confidence in Anglo-Saxon society tends to mean a lot more about individual expression,” said Rivers. “In Asia, confidence takes shape in the form of very good execution. That said, China and Asia is changing – as legal service providers, whether in a law firm or in-house, you are going to be leading this new wave of confident clients into international negotiations.”

WIN will hold events in Singapore and Beijing over the next couple of months; and those events will be based on the cultural reception of different jurisdictions, for example, the WIN event to be held in Beijing may be a roundtable for general counsel, depending on market uptake to these events from in-house lawyers in China. Rivers said the firm is making an effort to tailor make events to suit the different needs.

Rivers believes that the program will be widely accepted in Asia, as perspectives of in-house lawyers are changing, and they do want to belong to the legal community.

Asian members of WIN will have access to past global events including webinars, client panel discussions covering practical topics like Influencing Without Authority, Being Your Authentic Self, The Assertive Communicator, The Signs of Stress, Dealing with the Digital Age. There are also events for Future Legal Leaders, which provides a platform for young in-house lawyers to discuss career paths, career progression, going back into private practice from an in-house role and climbing the corporate ladder.

Also available, in multiple languages, are practice guides and toolkit, a library of publications, other collateral, regulatory updates, procedural data, etc. Access to these materials essentially helps in-house lawyers get these information in an organized and systematic way, hence saving them time sifting through the data.

According to Rivers, what makes WIN events stand out is because it is catered specifically to the legal industry. “Because lawyers hold a fiduciary duty, we are often conscious about our confidential requirements, how we say things, so these discussions are catered specifically for lawyers and in-house counsel that is applicable in their specific job scope.”

“As a lawyer, you are naturally a little bit cagey because you know it is a tough and slower changing professional environment. But they have to embrace that change,” she said.

“Your words are your weapon – how do you use it to express something that you want changed in a way that gets the maximum impact. So you get a community of support in the same kind of position that you are in.”