Law and Information

I’m currently in Shanghai, the most vibrant city I’ve ever visited. In my role as the Academic Coordinator of the University of St. Gallen’s Executive Master of Business Law (MBL-HSG) Program, I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve entered collaboration with the Fudan University here in Shanghai.

From September 3 to September 8, a group of 40 students of the MBL Program and 30 alumni will be visiting Shanghai and studying at Fudan. Allen Chan, Managing Director of LGT Investment Management (Asia) Ltd. and Senior Financial Consultant to the President of Fudan University, and an old high school friend, Nathan Kaiser, partner of Shanghai and Taipei-based law office Wenfei, have helped me to put together an interesting curriculum and a wonderful line-up of speakers. The goal of the Shanghai Module is to offer our students an introduction to “Law and Business in China”.

We will start with an introduction to Chinese culture and business culture, an overview of Chinese economy (past and present), and an introduction to the Chinese legal system. We will then focus on certain hot topics at the intersection of law, business, and economy, including WTO accession, IP Law, arbitration and litigation, corporate law and corporate governance, and taxation, among others. Our lecturers will include professors from Fudan University’s School of Management and Law Faculty, partners with local and international law firms, accountant companies, as well as inhouse counsels of multinational companies in China.

In addition to lectures and in-class discussions, we also organize field trips and informal dinners with practionners. We will be visiting the production facilities of Georg Fischer Automative, a Swiss manufacturer with 1800 employees in China and among the first companies with extensive (and successful) Joint Venture experience in China. We are also working on a field trip to Intel, where the General Counsel Asia will give us his take on IP law issues.

Among our special guests are Professor Anna Wu, former Head of the Equal Opportunity Office in Hong Kong, William Frei, Consul General of Switzerland in Shanghai, and Dr. Hans J. Roth, Consul General of Switzerland in Hong Kong. Lecturers include Michelle Gon, Parter with Baker & McKenzie, Daniel Fink, the Georg Fischer Delegate of the Corporate CEO in China, Regula Hwang, Credit Suisse, and Intel’s Chen Gong. Professor Carl Baudenbacher, president of the EFTA COURT in Luxembourg, will lead the Swiss delegation.

My colleague Daniel Haeusermann and I just released a new paper entitled “E-Compliance: Towards a Roadmap for Effective Risk Management.” In the article, which is largely based on consulting work we’ve been doing, we argue that the widespread use of digital communication technology on the part of business organizations leads to new types of challenges when it comes to the management of risks at the intersection of law, technology, and the marketplace. In order to effectively manage these challenges and associated risks in diverse areas such as security, privacy, consumer protection, IP, and content governance, we call for an integrated and comprehensive compliance concept in response to the structural and substantive peculiarities of the digital environment in which corporations - both in and outside the dot-com industry - operate today. See also this post. The conclusion section of the paper reads as follows:

Through significant efforts, the legal system has adjusted to the changes in the information and communications technology of daily corporate life—changes at the intersection of the market, technology, and law. Organizations must make adjustments on their part as well in order to deal with the consequences resulting from these changes in the legal system. The observation that led to this essay was that these adjustments represent a greater challenge than the already decreasing entropy surrounding concepts such as “e-commerce law” or “cyberlaw” would suggest. Our initial foray into the concept, characteristics, responsibilities and organizational guiding principles of e-Compliance confirms this observation.

E-Compliance, as discussed in this article, is confronted with the phenomenon of a close interconnection between law and technology, a prominent dynamization of the law, massive internationalization of issues and legal problems, as well as a strong increase in the significance of soft law. These characteristics, which in part may also apply to traditional areas of compliance such as financial market regulation, call in their interplay for the further development of compliance concepts as well as adaptation of the affected aspects of corporate organization. Due to the increasing amalgamation of corporate organizational nexus and ICT, the symbiotic relations between traditional compliance and e-Compliance will be increasingly amplified. The view that e-Compliance represents merely a single risk area among the many of compliance is therefore outdated in our opinion. E-Compliance is actually a multidimensional and multidisciplinary task, although there are certainly areas of law that are particularly affected by digitization (or also which particularly impact digitization) and therefore are of particular importance for the field of e-Compliance.

Thus, in conclusion, the authors do not posit a special “e-Sphere” within or without existing compliance departments. Rather, we argue for an integrated and comprehensive compliance concept that appropriately makes allowance for the structural and substantive peculiarities of e-Compliance as outlined in this essay and stays abreast with the pace of digitization.

Please contact Daniel or me if you have comments.