International Law

How To Choose Your China Attorney. Quality, Quality, Quality.

By Dan

Co-blogger Steve Dickinson and I recently wrrapped up a China law suit. I would love to be able to provide full details, but I need to give some distance to the case before I can do that. The Chinese law firm with which we worked (I will name names eventually) did an absolutely fabulous job and it deserves massive credit. 

I mentioned my delight with this firm to Steve recently and he responded with the following email:

The reason ______ has influence with the court is NOT because he is a powerful person. He has influence because the judges TRUST and RESPECT him. He never betrays the trust, and so the judges basically do what he says. That allows him to get judges to issue orders by telling them that something is true and that they will be getting the documents that support that. As lawyers, we completely understand how this works.  

I think clients sometimes do not understand this and so when you talk of how ________ has so much influence with the court, I worry they might think you are telling them he gets this influence improperly, which you and I both know is not the case.   

All true. But by the same token, we were recently involved in a joint venture deal gone bad in a small city in China which we settled because we knew that no matter how good a local lawyer we would retain for litigation, we would still be dealing with a very powerful and very local Chinese company on the other side. Again, though, our decisions were based, at least in small part, on the fact that we did not believe any lawyer would have sufficient "power" to secure a favorable verdict. 

The reality is that "powerful" people in China tend to go into business or government and not law. We have worked with a ton of very smart Chinese lawyers, but I am not sure any of them had massive "pull."  

So how should you go about choosing your litigation counsel in China? Choose based on quality, much as you would do anywhere else.  

What do you think?  

Full post as published by China Law Blog on October 15, 2010 (boomark / email).