Key points of corporate legal counsel services

Providing legal counsel to enterprises is a normal part of the law business, but corporate users’ assessment of the services that different legal teams make available varies widely. The question then is how can lawyers provide professional and value-for-money legal counsel to enterprises? The writers of this column propose to analyse briefly here the key points of corporate legal counselling in light of the service experience of their law firm’s legal service centre team.

UNDERSTANDING DEMAND

The demand for corporate legal counsel can be divided into types, based on different matters, such as long-term services, non-litigation specialised services, particular industry services, among others.

Long-term services are commonly understood to be the handling of routine legal matters of enterprises, including responding to legal queries; assisting in drafting and revising contracts and other such legal documents, as well as rules and regulations; participating in negotiations and discussions; in-house legal training; issuing lawyer’s letters; conducting legal analysis and fact finding, and issuing legal opinions, etc.

Non-litigation specialised services are more in-depth and comprehensive counsel provided to an enterprise for a specific matter. They mainly involve enterprises’ long-term investment, financing, corporate reorganization, restructuring, M&A, bankruptcy, liquidation, stock offering, listing and other matters.

Li Weiming is a partner and Wu Kun is an associate at Tiantai Law Firm