The Spaces International Center, north-western edge of the Central Business District and home to the GoldenGate law firm.
GoldenGate is a Chinese boutique law firm based in Beijing. It specializes (hence boutique) in arbitration & litigation, intellectual property rights, as well as general commercial practice and competes with bigger firms on expertise alone – at only 30 people or so (4 partners, 8 associates, the rest paralegals/assistants), we don’t have the manpower to issue IPOs for major corporations, but we can solve a business dispute and get you your money back as easily as the top dogs, and for a whole lot cheaper.
Arbiwhat, you say? How exactly does GoldenGate get your money back? Let me give you an example, as well as warn you ahead of time: this case is, of course, entirely make-belief.
Entrance to the office - the Golden Gates themselves.
Lets pretend you are a heavy equipment manufacturer from an imaginary country we’ll call England. Because China produces gargantuan amounts of this strange, nonexistent substance we will call steel to sell on the global market, you know you can come here to get a good price. So you contract with a fictitious Chinese state-owned business to sell you, oh say, 10,000 tons of steel. You agree to pay the price, the seller agrees to ship the goods when you fork over a couple million bucks, and both of you sign a contract that includes an arbitration clause that states “If either of us decides to act selfish and screw the other party, we will have the following court ______ (insert Chinese/British/other court) settle our dispute.” You wire the money to some unnamed Macao bank account, and sit down to wait for your shipload of steel. Lo and behold! The money disappears, and instead of 10,000 tons of steel, the ship docks with a grand total of 2,000 tons of low quality, no-use-to-anyone-but-the-scrap-yard metal. You scream bloody murder. You call the Chinese company and use unprintable language in your attempt to remedy the situation (you can guess what kind of results that will get ya – that’s right, a big fat zero). You cry on your mommy’s shoulder and shed rivers of tears over your lost millions of dollars. But then, there is a light at the end of the tunnel (its actually your wife who turned on the reading lamp and is telling you your legal counsel is on the line) which lets you realize that the binding contract both firms signed is still in full effect. You jump up and down for joy as you tell your in-house lawyer to find some hardcore badasses to drag the Chinese firm into arbitration court and give ‘em a good spankin’ (and get your money back!).
Reception area laid out in wood.
Arbitration court is a little different from criminal court. No one died because your business deal went sour (okay, I know you wish someone did) so a criminal court just won’t do – what you need is an authority who will listen to both parties and decide who owes whom how much, and what should be done to right the matter. Both of you picked the deciding authority when signing the contract. Let’s just pretend that the purely fictitious organization judging you in this case is called CIETAC, or the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission.
You begin searching for a law firm with a proven track record of success before CIETAC, after all, it is a Chinese organization and the only two things your lawyer knows about China is that the Olympics were once held there and his law school roommate dated a girl from Beijing in his first year. She might have made good Peking duck, but its still not a whole lot to work with. So your lawyer gets on the horn, and asks around for the best guys in the business – and the name GoldenGate may just turn up. You call GoldenGate, and for a small fee (there’s an understatement) the knights in shining armor (at least that’s how you think of them) go to work getting back what’s yours.
The process begins with GoldenGate sending a flowering letter to the Chinese steel manufacturer - said letter is principally centered around the notion of “give back the money, or deliver the steel, otherwise we will kick you so hard in the ass, you’ll be brushing your teeth with our Ferragamos’ shoelaces.” As is not at all surprising by this point in the game, the Chinese firm sends the equivalent of a “screw you” in reply. At this point, the only option left is to resort to CIETAC for arbitration – a rendering of judgment after both parties state their case.
My place of work - it has gotten a lot more cluttered than this - the work keeps piling up.
Before a court panel convenes, the folks at GoldenGate review all facts, evidence, do some speculating, and begin digging – followed by lots and lots of digging. What do they find? A Pandora’s Box worth of fraud, deceit, and downright thievery. Turns out the state-owned company you signed a sales contract with exists in little more than paper form – the address given leads you to an old, broken down warehouse in a rural province. Hold on, you say, they delivered some steel – maybe not all, but it had to come from a plant somewhere, right? Indeed, and after rolling their sleeves up even further, GoldenGate lawyers find out exactly where from. Turns out that state-owned assets (as in owned by the Party and the People) such as mills, smelters and furnaces were “sold” to a private organization in the same province for the outrageously steep price of 10 kuai. Folks, that’s not even enough to get something decent off the McDonald’s dollar menu, yet here we are talking about heavy industry and the assorted manufacturing equipment to go with it. These were the guys who were supposed to supply your steel.
You, with GoldenGate at the helm, have two major problems to deal with:
Problem 1: You signed a contract with what’s called a “shell corporation”, also known as “business vehicle”, instead of the real manufacturer. The entity exists on paper but is entirely controlled by others – and used as a shield when problems arise – because when you say “give me my money or I will take what assets you have” there is not a whole lot to take – remember that warehouse with tiles falling off its sides? Yep, that’s a problem when you’ve been swindled to the tune of several million greenbacks.
Problem 2: You do not have a contract (hence no arbitration clause) with the private organization that actually supplies the steel. This is where it gets tricky – not only do you want to bring the baddies to justice, but you want to get your money back!
I work closely with Jack (he does sit right behind me, after all) on most matters. He has a Bachelor's in mechanical engineering and a law degree from Beijing university - the Chinese equivalent of Yale. Since we sit back-to-back and both like to type furiously, sometimes the whole office is drowned out in the tapping noise - I call this smoking keyboards.
Solution: armed with this new (not to mention explosive) information, GoldenGate goes to CIETAC and initiates the process of turning a far-away province upside-down. After discovering who sold state assets (company executives), who covered up the sale (local government), and who let it all slide (government auditors), you begin to get closer to justice. However, everyone involved in the litigation wants a piece of blubber from the drowning whale – the People want their assets back, the government wants a fat cut, and all the way down the totem pole comes the foreign client who got screwed – you! After much meddling and peddling on behalf of GoldenGate to raise your totem-pole standing, you finally get your beloved money back. The process is not quick – a year’s time is considered lightening speed in arbitration – but GoldenGate gets the job done.
See, I told you this sort of thing could never happen. I also have a nice piece of beachfront property to sell you – it is located in downtown Beijing, China.
Though I am the only foreigner at the firm, our clients are almost exclusively international – those who do or wish to do business in China. Coincidentally, that is also the origin of our name (it has nothing to do with the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fran, sorry guys) – simply put, we are your Gate to conducting business in China. Gold is also an important part of Chinese tradition – it represents royalty and importance, among other meanings.
Besides arbitration, GoldenGate also handles intellectual property matters – someone steals your company name, website layout, or product design and you’re out for blood – as well as general commercial work, such as making sure that no gross legal violations occur when a foreign company is conducting business in China. This is how we make money.
My first official business cards - its always nice to belong to something. Out of the 500 I received in the first pack, over 350 are already gone. That's right, networking is a way of life in this city.
What do I do, you ask? Mostly what I’m doing now – writing! I draft English letters dealing with day-to-day business and polish translations. All of our partners and lawyers speak good English, but their writing often needs one final shine before being sent to a client. This work is very interesting and highly educational – not only am I handed a document and asked to polish it, but I am given a good explanation of the case (along with access to the entire file) so that I actually know what’s going on. This is very important – not only am I looking for grammatical errors to fix, but the writing must make sense. As a result, I’ve learned to not only tolerate legalese (gasp!) but actually read it for deeper understanding. Some of my time is also spent on legal research – much like in the West, the Chinese legal system uses precedent, so I often read through past cases to try and find one creative way or another to pin some dirtbag to a wall – basic lawyer work. My workflow process goes something like this: Tim, our managing partner will toss Jack (associate) and myself a piece of work – such as a case. Jack and I will conduct research, with Jack then drafting the Chinese documents. Tim will review these, with Jack correcting and translating the files into English before sending them over to me for proofreading. After we run through this circle, the files get sent out to pertinent parties. Every once in a while a court attendance is in order. I also get a "stipend" to attend events all over the city and fly the GoldenGate flag - the promotion part of my job. More on this later.
A photographer came in to take photos for the website. I guess he was unused to shooting Westerners because he couldn't find the perfect place to take pics of me. What resulted was a 20 min pro-level photo-shoot-scramble around the office with me posing, the paralegals giggling, and everyone having a great time. In the second photo, Beijing is laid out below me.
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