Joseph Shang, after graduating from Fudan Law School, a top law school in China, started his legal career with Zhongjian Law Firm (“Zhongjian”), a local Chinese law firm in 1999. The first three years at Zhongjian were very happy, as Joseph recalled. He felt thrilled about absorbing new knowledge and gaining more experiences every day. Gradually, he became a star associate at Zhongjian, and was put onto the most difficult cases of the firm.
Joseph’s honeymoon at Zhongjian ended when he became more capable of dealing with clients independently, and certain conflict with his supervising partner emerged without much advance notice.
After picking up those basic lawyering skills, Joseph was taking more responsibilities in handling with the majority of details and operational work for clients while his supervising partner only took part in the significant client meetings to determine the overall direction of and general framework for legal solutions. This way of distribution of work between Joseph and his supervising partner has lead to both sides’ conflicting opinions on their respective contribution to those individual cases, and how much they are entitled to out of the revenues generated from those cases.
In Joseph’s eyes then, his contribution to those individual cases were so substantial that the salaried compensation he obtained from the firm did not seem to be in proportion to his contribution. On the other hand, Joseph’s supervisor took the opposite view that the compensation Joseph got was fair and reasonable. The rationale behind the supervising partner’s view was two-folded. First, it was him who trained Joseph into a skillful associate, and therefore, the supervising partner’s taking full credit of the work Joseph has done on his cases is nothing but fair. Secondly, it was still him who determined the overall direction of and general framework for legal solutions (which is the most important part of rendering quality legal advices), and thus Joseph’s contribution to those cases was not as significant as Joseph had thought of.
By 2004, the tension between Joseph and his supervising partner had become increasingly intense. During the worst days, the supervising partner no longer trusted his “favorite apprentice”, and eventually refused to dispatch any more of his cases to Joseph. At that point, Joseph’s professional development at Zhongjian came to a real bottleneck.
Apart from the push, there was also a pull that led to Joseph’s final decision to leave Zhongjian in March 2004.
Chenyao Wu, a former partner of Zhongjian, left the firm in August 2003, and began to run his own legal practice under the name of another firm (which followed the traditional Chinese law firm model of “nominal partnership, de facto solo practice”). Chenyao has rich experience, good personality, and strong network. With all these combined, Chenyao has large amount of business. When practicing solo, Chenyao, however, confronted with a tough issue, which was the fact that he was too busy to handle with all the cases he had. To solve that issue, Chengyao sought “cooperation” with Joseph, his former colleague and star associate at Zhongjian, and offered very appealing “cooperation terms”. Under those terms, Joseph can not only get a decent annual salary, but also quasi partner treatment for cases that he would bring in by himself, which means he is entitled to 100% of the profits generated out of his own cases.
On March 1, 2004, Joseph officially left Zhongjian and joined Chenyao’s practice, which was the predecessor of Diligence Law. It was at that time that Joseph began to convert himself from a skillful lawyer into a marketed-oriented one. Joseph recalled that it was a client who inadvertently said to him,
If you do not develop the market, who is supposed to do that?
This simple comment woke Joseph up, diverted his interest from legal techniques to client development, and eventually brought out his potential as a marketer and organizer.
Joseph broke his market development efforts into three parts: (i) his former clients at Zhongjian; (ii) small real estate clients attracted from his frequent publication of articles on real estate related newspapers; and (iii) his new niche area of Internet and e-commerce. While the first two are more of the traditional ways of developing one’s own clients in China, the third one is more like a “blue ocean” strategy that Diligence Law has later adopted firm-wide.
Joseph’s interest in Internet and e-commerce law dated back to his early law school days. When Internet and bulletin board system were first introduced into China, Joseph was among the early adopters. Taking advantage of his technical background and legal knowledge, Joseph frequently wrote Cyberlaw-related articles online, which gradually established his specialty in this brand new arena. While many Chinese lawyers had not figured out what impacts Internet and e-commerce would bring to human beings, Joseph published his book on Cyberlaw in August 2005, which earned him much credit and reputation among Internet related and high-tech companies.
As one of Joseph’s high-tech company clients said,
We hired Joseph as our lawyer because he was famous in this practice area given that he had won several milestone cases in the online gaming industry. Furthermore, we prefer Joseph’s legal services as he knows more about the business aspects of this industry.
After gaining more trust and business from those high-tech companies who rely on his Cyberlaw expertise, Joseph extended his business line with those clients, moving from intellectual property related matters to other corporate general work (including contract review, merger and acquisition, and corporate governance advices, among others). This turned out to be an effective way for Joseph to stabilize his client base and expand into more business.
With a growing client base, Chenyao and Joseph formally partnered with Zhisong Zhang, an expert on lawyers’ administration who used to be the Director of Shanghai Jing’an Judicial Bureau, and turned their legal practice into an independent law firm, and named it as Diligence Law.
Till this point, for Joseph personally, he has successfully accomplished his conversion from a skillful lawyer into a market-oriented partner.