Gary P. Biehn’s speech in Winners【附讲稿全文】

Gary P. Biehn’s speech in Winners

2018年8月2日，金诺的战略合作伙伴、美国White & Williams LLP 的合伙人Gary P. Biehn先生在访问天津期间，应邀在金诺做了一场讲座，介绍了设立于1899年的White & Williams LLP律师事务所的发展历程以及他本人的职业生涯，也介绍了如何在美国成为一名执业律师。Gary 还和大家分享了费城与天津、怀威与金诺的渊源以及双方的合作，希望未来双方在更多的领域开展合作，共同服务我们的客户。

Thank you Haibo. And first, let me just say it's wonderful to be back at Winners Law Firm and congratulations for your new space. It's absolutely beautiful job. Well done. I heard about the new space when Haibo and Andrew visited us in New York and Philadelphia.  Uh, now it's very exciting to see it for the first time. And I thought at the request of Haibo that I would provide a little background on White & Williams also discuss a little bit more on how White & Williams and Winners have become partners. And then talk about some of the works that we do a little bit about the practice of law in the United States.  And then, also talk a little bit about the future of legal works, not only between our two great firms, but also between our two great countries.

White & Williams is a very old law firm. We started in 1899, in Philadelphia.  And I think as many of you know, Philadelphia is a very historic city. It is a place where the United States was born. It's a former capital of the USA. Back in the day, when such people like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Benjamin……

And when we first started, when Mr. White and Mr. Williams first started the law firm, we primarily represented other large and old insurance companies in the United States, including the insurance company in north America, which was the first insurance company and it was founded in Philadelphia in the late eighteen hundreds. 

We now have two hundred and fifty lawyers at our firm. And when I joined the firm many years ago, we were only in Philadelphia.  And now we've expanded to New York city, Boston, Wilmington, Delaware, and many other locations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey. And later this year we will open our office in Washington, DC. 

Our greatest growth has been in New York city as Haibo said, we have a beautiful office space by Times Square. And we now have over forty attorneys and a significant part of our international practice groups, including Jaime and she'll tell you a little bit more about her practice on our New York office.

Well, there is a little history about the relationship between Philadelphia and Tianjin,  which led to the relationship between Winners and White & Williams. 

And so this thirty eight years ago, Philadelphia became the first sister city to Tianjin. Back in 2002, at that time I don't have white hair. I worked on a project, my first project in China to establish a joint venture and establish a chain of convenience stores up in Shenyang. 

I have returned many many times at least one time a year and I'm truly amazed at all of the changes of this great city of Tianjin and it's always a pleasure to return. 

I think in 2007-2008, my firm started to attend the private equity conference posted here in Tianjin. And I had the great honor as serving as a lecturer at that conference, because around the same time, my colleague Chun Sheng Lu and I trialed a case in Shanghai, and we won the case that stood for the proposition that under Chinese law, you could enforce western private equity contracts at the early time.

I should have found that with the development of private equity in Tianjin，it became clear to me，and with the sister city history, that this would be the ideal location to develop a stronger relationship with the law firm. So we contacted the foreign affairs office in Tianjin through the sister city program, and we asked to be introduced to the top law firm in Tianjin. And that's when I met Haibo.

Like many strong and successful relationships, we took our time to get to know one another. We spent several years talking, I visited Winners. And it became very clear to me that not only was this an excellent law firm, but it had excellent people and an excellent culture. That was very similar to the culture that I enjoy at White & Williams.

As Haibo said, back in 2012, first we had some attorneys including Andrew visited us, and we had a ceremony, and with the mayor of Philadelphia, mayor Michael Nutter, presenting,  in our very old and famous city hall,  which  remains the largest city hall in the world. It was built in eighteen seventies, and when it was designed, it was actually the largest building  and tallest building in the world.

That year we come back to Tianjin, to participate in a ceremony to further our relationship and to highlight some of the top relationships between Tianjin and Philadelphia, included a new relationship that actually Haibo help to introduce with Nankai university and our client， good friends at Drexel university. And another cooperation relationship of our client, the  Philadelphia Orchestra.

So that's the history of our two firms. And we look forward to many more years of cooperation. And now Haibo asked me to talk a little bit aboutthe practice of law in the United States and some of my own experiences.

So I think many of you know that to become a lawyer in the USA , you must first do four years of college. And then you apply to law school, and then you do three years of legal education. And then some lawyers, if you're a tax lawyer, for example, then you go on for two more years to get a master degree. So your average age in the United States starts practicing when he or she is about twenty five years old. 

And for anyone training to become a lawyer, the most important year of their education is their first year in law school because depending on how you do will depend on what job you get. And the major law firms will only hire the top ten percent of the major law schools. 

And I was very fortunate that I did well in law school. And after my first year, I interviewed with a firm called White & Williams in Philadelphia. And I was only a first-year law student, and it was brand new jean. Most people are hired in their second year. But somehow they saw promise in me and they hired myself and a young lady out of Harvard law school. 

I was destined to come to China. When I was studying in business school at Temple University, I was there at the time Deng Xiao Ping get honorary degree. And then I went on to law school at Duke University. And of course, our most famous graduate was president Richard Nixon, who helped open up relations with China.  

So when you joined a law firm and this remained the same. And I'll tell you my experience at White & Williams. The first decision you make is whether you want to be a litigator and go to trial in court, or whether you want to be a business lawyer.

The first three, four, five years training with very senior partners who are very experienced at our law firm, we have a tradition that you give the most responsibility to the youngest person who can handle that responsibility. 

So in my first year, I was put on a very large case, where we were selling one of our companies to a joint venture.  And it was between very large British company and a very large German company.

Because I am German speaking, the managing partner, I thought it was appropriate in my first year, send me up to the very famous law firm Sullivan and Cromwell in New York to close the transaction. 

That was my first experience in international law and I could see that it was very exciting. It's very interesting dealing with different cultures. And I can see that that was what I wanted to do for my future. So for about the first ten years of my practice, I work with a team of lawyers, and we focused on transactions, in Europe primarily. And I did a lot of negotiations in Switzerland and in Germany.

I think it shows that I develop my law career at the right time, because it was a time when in America it became clear to be a very successful company, you needed to be able to do successful business around the world. 

That White & Williams represented for seventy years is an auto tier supplier. They supplied a product to the big companies. And in our case, our client was the longest continuous supplier of General Motors. They had been its first supplier, and had supplied General Motors for over a hundred years. 

So we spent about a year and a half negotiating a joint venture with one of the top public companies in Switzerland, because General Motors came to us and said, if you do not have the capability to supply us with your product throughout the world, you will no longer do business with us.

I then traveled with that client to China because they had to establish their presence here. And although I, unlike my son, have no ability to speak Chinese. I quickly learned that many top officials and top decision makers in China were engineers, and many of them had been educated in Germany or Switzerland, and I spent many meetings speaking German with my Chinese counterparts. 

You have to be flexible and you have to look with the new opportunities. So because I may have made several visits to China, He just felt that China must be a key market to develop.

We brought Jamie in to join us, and one of my other colleagues who visited earlier in the year, Howard Jiang, and others, because we believe that the relationship and the opportunities with China is a very important part of our future. 

One of our most interesting clients is the Philadelphia Orchestra and I think you may all know the history. But I'll go through the history in any event back in 1973, President Nixon, after negotiations by Henry Kissinger, made the first visit to China to meet with the Chinese President.

Nixon asked our very famous conductor, Eugene Normandy at the Philadelphia Orchestra, if they would come on and do a concert on and perform in Beijing. Without before you'll see what happened. And I had the great privilege to help the Philadelphia Orchestra, organize their tour for the 40th anniversary of that first performance, that took place in 2013. And with the Winners’ help, we were able to also bring the Philadelphia Orchestra to Tianjin. I'll have meetings with the president of the Philadelphia Orchestra and they're in discussions now and hopefully will be back in China next year and hopefully we'll be able to announce that they're also going to perform as part of the 70th anniversary of the new China. 

Here in Philadelphia, we have a World Trade Center. It's not the big World Trade Center in New York. It's a franchise World Trade Center of greater Philadelphia. And I've had been serving as board directors for the last ten years, and the last four years being the board president.

And at the World Trade Center we have something called the China operations club. And it is a group of companies, about forty companies, that are very experienced in doing business in China. And those companies range from start-up technology companies to children's hospital, Philadelphia ambassadors, ice cream. And when Haibo and Andrew were visiting in Philadelphia, they were kind enough to share some of their insights on China law with that great organization. There's a great ice cream company so that's one of the reasons we're here. Because BAXY ice cream is the oldest ice cream in the United States. China is now the biggest market except they don't do business in Tianjin. Michael Strange, the president of BAXY is a good friend of mine and, we're having discussions this afternoon to find a way for them to distribute  in Tianjin.

But the main purpose for my visit this time to Tianjin is to see your new firm in a new location. But more importantly, to further some of the introductions in cooperation that Haibo and others here and helped us with. So we've had discussions yesterday, at a party to Eco-centre Tianjin Binhai High-tech Industrial Area, and to find ways that we can have the companies that we represent. Also the companies in our World Trade Center to find opportunities to do business with companies here in Tianjin.

Never hesitate. because as Jamie and I were speaking, every good lawyer, you're only a good lawyer if you can find solutions. And we think we're good lawyers because we know how to find solutions. And we're very confident there are many other ways in the future that our companies to work together. Thank you.