Two weeks ago, I wondered when there would be an opportunity for me to display my talents, but actually the opportunity was already on the way and approaching me. Soon I received a call from the partner in which he asked to go to Shanghai to assist our client in an important negotiation.

Our client is one key important state-owned company and is going to have a hundreds-million deal with GE. GE has two counsels, one is its in-house, and the other is an England attorney from Singapore. In the beginning,  I really worry about the negotiation for the situation was really serious  for our client. They only talked with GE’s Chinese guys in Chinese, the progress was very very slow and I found they actually did not know what exactly the agreement talked about. Obviously, the parties are not equally positioned, not only the marketing positions, but also the negotiation skills.

So I reviewed the draft very carefully and then sent to GE’s counsel a list of opinions in writing. On this Wednesday and Thursday, the parties had two telephone conferences, in which I directly talked with GE’s in-house counsel, and persuaded them to accept all my reasonable proposals. By the end of Thursday, GE has stepped backed a lot compared with the original draft. Our client was very surprised that I negotiated several favorable clauses for them and kept asking me “Has they accepted that?” The answer is YES. My first time service has won their recognition and acceptance, they even requested to have my name to be listed in the legal service agreement with our firm.

To be straight, I am really glad that the opportunity finally fell on me and my work has been highly praised by my client. But for some reasons, I felt a little sad. Although “made in china” has nearly spread over every corner of the world, our country is still far behind some developed countries in some key technologies, that’s why our client and GE are of unequal positions in this negotiation. Also, I just found some Chinese in foreign companies are nuts, sometimes our proposals were acceptable to US representatives but those Chinese guys would refuse them with very unreasonable reasons.

To bow down, we need courage; to rise up, we need power!