China Hearsay

From their website:

I’ve been living and working in Beijing since 1999, mostly as a private lawyer with local and international law firms. As of February 2013, I moved in-house with Bentley Systems, an American software company, where I head up the Asia Legal team.

Bentley is in quite an interesting industry niche. Here is a quick window into my world, from our web page:

Bentley is the global leader dedicated to providing architects, engineers, geospatial professionals, constructors, and owner-operators with comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure. Bentley’s mission is to empower its users to leverage information modeling through integrated projects for high-performing intelligent infrastructure. Its solutions encompass the MicroStation platform for infrastructure design and modeling, the ProjectWise platform for infrastructure project team collaboration and work sharing, and the AssetWise platform for infrastructure asset operations – all supporting a broad portfolio of interoperable applications and complemented by worldwide professional services.

If you followed that, you probably are in the infrastructure biz or related to it in some way (e.g., engineering, design, construction, owner/operator). If that was wholly incomprehensible, no worries (this wiki page may help).

In terms of my career in China thus far, I have covered most aspects of foreign direct investment, and my practice in recent years has been focused on technology regulatory and licensing work, intellectual property, media and entertainment, franchising and Internet-related issues.

It’s a broad area, but my private practice experience was still quite focused compared to having a general corporate practice. My current position is a mix and includes both a focus on licensing and commercial work but with broader issues, such as general corporate, HR, M&A/FDI — well, just about anything you can think of that would apply to a multinational in Asia.

I started the China Hearsay blog in 2006, and it had a great run. Some day I might bring it back, but for the time being, I’ll be sticking with social media.