Chinese Lawyers are Stupid, Don’t Trust Them
During these past two months at Zhong Lun Law Firm, I found a huge new client, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, one of the world’s biggest companies, and endured the excitement of hard work resulting in actual business, and the disappointment associated with a complete loss of this business, caused by other lawyers here at this jungle.
My experience with Pfizer is an example of why at a Chinese law firm like Zhong Lun, you have two choices, and both are equally bad: you can cooperate with other Chinese attorneys, and whatever you produce together will be wrong; or you can turn work away since you know it is going to done incorrectly, then be criticized by management that is rabid for quick profits and has no regard for the quality of the work they produce. I did the latter, that is I turned down Pfizer work, and am glad I did because it was the only way I could live up to my ethical responsibilities as a lawyer.
I spent the first four months of my existence at this firm courting big US and European companies, and a few turned into real legal work, including Pfizer. Pfizer’s China lawyer, who I got to know, spent a few years working at the company’s US headquarters and had some experience working with US counsel.
One day, he approached me with a new assignment. He explained that Pfizer had a big problem: their name, Pfizer, was trademarked in China, but being used illegally, both in English and Chinese, by Chinese medicine companies, and Pfizer wanted a long term plan to enforce their rights.
Pfizer’s US based legal office instructed me to give them a few things to prepare for this assignment. They wanted a firm introduction, a brief list and biography of the different attorneys who would participate in this work, the anticiapted price, and a detailed plan of action.
When I received this request, I took my firm’s litigators out to lunch to learn about their experience with IP litigation, and to my dismay found out that they had absolutely none. But, what was remarkable was that their inexperience or ignorance of the subject matter didn’t prevent them from claiming knowledge of it, something I call “pretendism” in my other blog posts.
Specifically, the litigation department head said,
“Jeff, you need to learn how things work in China. It isn’t necessary to have experience with this work to succeed with a case. It is all about relationships with the courts.”
Well, that didn’t make me feel very comfortable, and I didnt believe her. The people who I worked with at firms in the USA were legitimately knowledgable, and often really experts, in their subject matter. These people were just novices, and incompetent novices at that.
The other leader of the group, however, sounded less believable.
Wang Jialu, who has since relocated ot Commerce Law Firm, said:
“Jeff, I am an expert in all litigation, and what I don’t know I can make believe I do.”
That just totally freaked me out, since he was the one attorney at the firm without a real law degree, and the person who had considered a career in acting, instead. This was not a particularly smart man.
Anyhow, as a first step, I wrote a background memo on the issue for Pfizer, careful not to give any legal opinions since I knew that every Chinese attorney at the firm, each desperately in need of more clients, would soon start complaining that as a foreigner I wasn’t allowed to do legal work. And I compiled information about each of the partners who would help with this assignment, and the work press.
Then, I started to speak with the partners to understand their specific plans for this work, and I quickly realized something: they had no idea how to handle this work, and had no real experience with IP work.
These people, in fact, didnt seem to understand the most basic information about trademarks and IP that I was taught in my law school classes. It was obvious that I was interacting with people who pretended to be lawyers, but at least insofar as lawyers n the US were concerned, were barely more educated that a first year undergraduate.
I also realized that if I passed this assignment to them, their ignorance would cause errors in the work process, that the work would not be done correctly, and that I would be blamed for choosing this group to do the work. So, I did what i was taught in law school. I told Pfizer to find another firm, and helped them find the firm.
A few weeks later, my firm’s managing partner called me to his office, and said he read my personal emails that told Pfizer to find another firm because my firm was incompetent to do the work. He said I would be fired if I ever did that again. My reply, of course, was that I did the right thing: Zhong Lun had nobody capable of doing this work, and the work would’ve been done incorrectly. I made the right decision.
May 14, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Trademark enforcement strategies? Sheez, you’d think that a company like Pfizer could afford to get in-house people to work on that for a market like China.