Following Mr. Thao’s presentation on the Vietnamese Lawyers Federation and the history of the legal industry in Vietnam, the delegates turned their attention to Alex Larkin, who talked about the legal framework for foreign investment and the establishment of business entities in Vietnam.  Alex is a transplant from Washington State, so he had a unique perspective on the opportunities available to foreign investors.

Part 2 of this post will address Alex’s comments on the energy-producing sector as a potential for foreign investment.

Alex began by saying that the government is taking action that attracts and encourages foreign direct investment (FDI)  They want to encourage the export of goods and reform the administration procedures in order to reduce bureaucratic inefficiencies.

Vietnam, because of its history, is a very bureaucratic place governmentally.  It’s very slow – while you can get anything done, it will always take a long time.  So there has been a lot of effort recently to reform these procedures to make things more attractive for investors.  One such effort is "e-government" which will allow people to do things online more efficiently.

Continue Reading Legal Framework for Foreign Investment & Establishment of Business Entities in Vietnam with Alex Larkin

During the ILN’s 2011 Asia Pacific Regional Meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam, we had a very interesting presentation with Mr. Nguyen Van Thao, the Vice Chairman of the Vietnam Lawyers Federation.  He treated the group to a fascinating history of legal practice in Vietnam, and the current state of the legal industry.  After a welcome from our chairman, our local host lawyer, Mr. Phan Nguyen Toan, translated the presentation for us.

Mr. Thao is the current and permanent Vice Chairman for the Vietnamese Lawyers Federation, which is the national organization for all practicing Vietnamese lawyers.  He began with some information about the establishment of the Vietnamese legal association, and the current status of Vietnamese lawyers.

History of the Legal Field in Vietnam – Pre-1987

Vietnam was a longtime colony of France, since before 1945.  At that time, they had two small groups of lawyers – one in Hanoi and one in Ho Chi Minh city.  But those lawyers were made up of only French lawyers – there were some members who were Vietnamese and had studied French law, but they were only paralegals or support staff for the French lawyers.

Continue Reading Vietnam Lawyers Federation and Legal Practice in Vietnam with Mr. Nguyen Van Thao

Welcome to ILN-terviews, a series of profiles of ILN member firm attorneys, designed to give a unique insight into the lawyers who make up our Network. For our latest interview, we chose ILN member, Mark Weintraub of Clark Wilson in Vancouver, Canada.

In one sentence, how would you describe your practice?
My British Columbia practice is estate and trust litigation and adult guardianship. My practice consists of challenging Wills based upon incapacity and undue influence and dealing with negligently or fraudulently administered estates.

Who would be your typical client?
We have two types of typical clients- individuals and institutions. Individuals can find themselves embroiled in any number of different types of disputes:

Adult children, not infrequently challenge a Will based upon undue influence; incapacity or some technical defect in a Will and in our jurisdiction, may seek to vary a will if it does not provide adequate support which may under circumstances include the judicial imposition of moral obligations.

Spouses, particularly spouses of second marriages, also seek our counsel for similar types of challenges. Of course there are numerous other issues related to estate litigation including negligent or fraudulent adminstration of an estate; estate and power of attorney accountings; and adult guardianship applications all of which involve individuals.

Our institutional clients, if they are trust companies, are often engaged in adminstration disputes while our non- profit or charitable clients who are named in wills as beneficiaries, endure "collateral damage" in the event that a spouse or child challenges a will.

I am of course simplifying matters and there are a myriad of other situations that involve both our individual and institutional clients.

What would you like clients and potential clients to know about you?
I would like our clients to know that we have one of the largest group of estate litigators in Canada such that we are able to provide an appropriate skill and billing level for every circumstance. We endeavour to run a file like a business file. And finally the watchword of our firm is "service" and we use our best efforts to provide the highest level of service to our clients.

What has been your most challenging case? Why?
There is no one challenging case; but the most challenging cases are typically a second wife who has been left out of a Will and has attracted the emnity of the children from the first marriage. Typically she is not sophisticated and foresees herself as cast out on the street. The emotion permeating such a case makes resolution very difficult.

What has been your proudest moment as a lawyer?
There is no one proudest moment; of course when you receive a winning judgment or you negotiate what you know is an excellent settlement there is a sense of pride. But most lawyers try to invest in each file- irrespective of the amount involved- a committment to excellence so that when an excellent result is achieved, one naturally feels a sense of pride.

More specifically I think it would be fair to say that those cases that involve the most creative arguments; those cases that don’t have precedent and you are charting new ground; and those cases where there is a lot at stake for the individual- those are the cases that engender that special sense of satisfaction.

What do you do when you’re not practicing law?
When I am not practicing law I am thinking about how to develop the practice of law; spend time with my family including two wonderful daughters and their husbands and great friends.

What would surprise people most about you?
I don’t know- none of us are one -dimensional and nothing should ever surprise us about another person- but if I had to choose- that I put myself through University of Toronto Law School while working for the Toronto Parks Board.

What has been your most memorable ILN experience?
A file I received acting for the State of Israel in an estate matter. It was a great honour to provide this service since much of my volunteer work has been centred on charitable causes for Israel.

What career would you have chosen if you weren’t a lawyer?
Hands Down: Bridge Engineer.

If a movie were made of your life, who would you want to play you?
I actually was in a movie and I played a Rabbi; if a movie was made of me, I would have wanted Norman Mailer to play me.

How would you like to be remembered?
Sounds like writing my own obituary- but it is actually an important question; I think I would like to be remembered the way many of us would be: that I lived life to my potential- to the best of my abilities; that I have brought more healing than harm into the world; that I was a good friend; loyal business partner; devoted family member and caring of those parts of the natural world such as gardens or animals that have come into my charge.

It’s that time again – time for the 2011 Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Conference. This year, it will be in Orlando, Florida and after the winter we’ve had, I couldn’t be happier about it! 

But it’s not all sun and fun – there’s a lot of work, and valuable networking too.  

I’m posting a list of the sessions I’ll be attending – I’ll be tweeting from each and blogging a re-cap of each session as well.  To follow along with the Twitter stream, you can check out the #LMA11 hashtag – that aggregates all of the tweets that contain that hashtag – you can follow me on Twitter, or you can follow Laura Gutierrez or Heather Morse’s Twitter lists.

And if you’re attending the conference, and you’re not on my list, please let me know! 

On to the sessions (all times are local to Orlando. Florida)…

Tuesday, April 5, 2011
9:00 – 10:30: Keynote Event: Disney’s Approach to Business Excellence

11:00 – 12:15: Improving Visibility: Effectively Leveraging Social Media as a Business Development & Marketing Tool – Concrete Examples of What’s Acceptable, and What’s Working

2:15 – 3:30: Managing Client Retention and Value: Using Client Feedback to Create Truly Meaningful Client Experiences and Deliver Greater Value

4:15 – 5:30: Honing Your Leadership Skills: The Path to World Class – Exploring the Attributes that Distinguish Top-tier Legal Marketing and Business Development Teams

Wednesday, April 6, 2011
9:00 – 10:00: General Session – Achieving Greater Collaboration  – What you need to know to get to a win-win relationship with your clients (General Counsel Session)

10:45 – 12:00: Honing Your Leadership Skills: Elevating the Marketing and Business Development Function: Law Firm Leadership Panel

1:45 – 3:00: Improving Visibility: Maximized Marketing: Budget Boundaries and Successful Strategies for Small to Mid-Sized Firms

Looks like there will be a lot of value at this conference, so keep your eyes out for our tweets and blog posts!

Welcome to ILN-terviews, a series of profiles of ILN member firm attorneys, designed to give a unique insight into the lawyers who make up our Network. For our latest interview, we chose ILN member, Carole Barrett of Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin in San Francisco, California.

In one sentence, how would you describe your practice? 
Everything branding.

Who would be your typical client?
My clients come in all shapes and sizes and are at various stages of the business cycle, from start-ups to well-established global companies – all of whom are concerned about protecting and enforcing their intellectual property.

What would you like clients and potential clients to know about you?
I have been both in-house and in private practice, so my advice is practical, business-focused and tailored to clients’ long-term goals.

What has been your most challenging case? Why?
Strategic planning and coordination of a massive global trademark filing where all of the marks had to be filed on the same day. Amazingly, it went off without a hitch.

What has been your proudest moment as a lawyer?
My proudest moments as a lawyer have been seeing young lawyers I have mentored succeed.

What do you do when you‚re not practicing law?
My husband Ned and I are avid boaters and members of the Golden Gate Yacht Club. So we are either out on the Bay on our boat or getting ready to welcome everyone to San Francisco for the America’s Cup.

What would surprise people most about you?
I think people would be surprised to learn that I studied ballet because my parents were worried about my being shy.

What has been your most memorable ILN experience?
ILN has been an wonderful global resource for locating attorneys who are experts in their field. I have enjoyed meeting with various ILN members at INTA and acting as a referral source.

What career would you have chosen if you weren’t a lawyer?
Ballerina!

If a movie were made of your life, who would you want to play you?
Meryl Streep.

How would you like to be remembered?
As a mentor. 

During our recent 2011 Asia Pacific Regional Meeting in Hanoi, I gave a presentation on five hot tips for client and business development.  These are all things that are familiar to the lawyers in our group, and probably all of you as well, but because they’re important, I felt they bear repeating.

Five Hot Tips

  1. Treat Your Clients as King: Your clients deserve to be treated like royalty. Deliver WOW to your clients by meeting their needs, not yours. Clients want to know what you can do for them, and the steps they need to follow to take action. Give them these things in a clear, easily understandable way, and you will undoubtedly find "favor with the king."
     
  2. Spread Ideas and Move People…Through Social Media: It can sound like a lot of what is out there is just noise.  But you can be out there, sharing your message.  Think like your clients and provide them with the message that is most useful to them.  You’re not using social media to talk at people – you’re there to talk with them. 

    When using social media, listen first and never stop listening. Be authentic and vulnerable, share stories with your audience, ask questions, provide value for free (yes, for free!), and engage with them. 

Continue Reading Five Hot Tips for Client and Business Development

A significant part of my job is planning our conferences, and we have four of these a year. Some people might consider me a party planner, but when you work for a network like ours, conference planning is much more than that – the purpose of our conferences is to facilitate relationships, and I need to plan each part of the conference around that goal.

Plus, I need to try to make everyone happy. Guess how often that happens?

Sometimes, facilitating relationships means pushing our delegates past their comfort zones (ie bike riding through rice paddies in Vietnam or sending them to a fish spa in Singapore) because it makes them feel a shared connection that leads to talking, laughing, and forming a relationship.

As I mentioned, we have four conferences a year – the Asia Pacific Meeting, the Annual Meeting, the European Regional Meeting, and the Americas Regional Meeting. As you might guess, anywhere from 2-4 of these are held outside the United States and that presents some interesting challenges, as well as offers some rewarding experiences.

I thought I’d share some of the lessons I’ve learned with you, because while these lessons were learned while planning conferences, they can also be applied to business done abroad as well.

Continue Reading Planning a Conference Abroad

Welcome to ILN-terviews, a series of profiles of ILN member firm attorneys, designed to give a unique insight into the lawyers who make up our Network. For our latest interview, we chose ILN member, Margie Bodas of Lommen, Abdo, Cole, King & Stageberg, P.A. in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In one sentence, how would you describe your practice?
I help creditors who find themselves at odds with a bankruptcy trustee work through the bankruptcy system.

Who would be your typical client?
A mortgage lender, a title insurance company, businesses who receive preference claims.  

What would you like clients and potential clients to know about you?
My knowledge and experience make me very effective and efficient in handling client matters.

What has been your most challenging case? Why?
The most challenging — or maybe most frustrating — was a couple decades ago when I was doing a lot of workers’ compensation work. A man was injured while working as a millright and could not go back to the heavy work and the bending and twisting. He wanted to be retrained in turf management to work at a golf course. Turf management is also very heavy work with lots of bending and twisting. We litigated the case and I lost. The guy got a job with an Arnold Palmer golf course and the employer had to pay him wage loss benefits because, even after being retrained, he was not making as much as he did as a millright. The outcome did not seem to serve either party in the long run.

What has been your proudest moment as a lawyer?
A great moment for me — and our firm — was obtaining a very large settlement in a RICO claim against a rent-to-own business on claims of usury. We were able to refund a lot of money to people who really couldn’t afford the interest rates charged.

What do you do when you’re not practicing law?
Travel, photography, garden, home renovation, read.

What would surprise people most about you?
I was a journalist before becoming a lawyer. I interviewed President Carter once.

What has been your most memorable ILN experience?
The webinars have been a great resource — not only for the information they provide but for their ability to bring the lawyers here together with other ILN lawyers across the world.

What career would you have chosen if you weren’t a lawyer?
I was a journalist before becoming a lawyer and loved it. I choose law school over the seminary, but would also like to explore that avenue. And I’d like to work in a garden shop when I retire.

If a movie were made of your life, who would you want to play you?
Kathy Bates.

How would you like to be remembered?
She sought out ways to serve others . She shared her joys (and hardships) of life with her friends and family.

Sometimes, I read someone else’s posts and am so inspired by them, I just can’t keep my mouth shut.

Such is the case this morning with Nancy Myrland’s latest post, "Social Media: It’s Time…Embrace it Already!"

As Nancy said:

Social Media are being used by employees of all ages and interests. You can no longer keep these communication tools out of their lives during the work day just as you can’t keep email, telephone and face-to-face communication away from people. These are tools that are here to stay, and will become a large part of every business around you, so it’s time to:

  • Become familiar with them.
  • Frame them.
  • Train people on them.
  • Monitor them.
  • Integrate them in to your business and marketing plans.
  • Then repeat all of these steps regularly.

 

Continue Reading Social Media – Why Are We Still Afraid of it?