Job Description: Partner and Head of Asia IP and TMT Practice in Asia, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
You should base your questions on this information. It is always good to start with some questions about the person, and how they got into this profession.
The main part of your interview is about what decisions people have to make about claims of truth. How do they make these decisions? What sort of evidence counts? They may be able to give you a story of a particular case or incident.
In this case it might be important to ask whether what intellectual property really means and how it can be decided on. Are there cases where it has been hard to decide who owns the rights to ideas or documents? How do they establish this sort of ownership?
Freshfields is an international law firm and we provide legal advice to our network clients in all countries throughout the world where they operate. My specialist area is intellectual property law (copyright, patents, trademarks) and TMT (technology media and telecommunications). The advice I provide to clients is a mixture of:
- commercial advisory;
- regulatory;
- corporate transactions;
- disputes and litigation.
My role involves advising clients as to their legal rights and obligations and helping them to create legal structures that allow them to achieve the commercial goals, which they have set for their organisations.
This typically involves me gathering a lot of background information about the particular issue at hand, e.g. if they are looking to set up a new commercial relationship they need to tell me about the commercial basis on which they want to conduct the relationship, they need to tell me about discussions that have occurred between them and the counterparty. They need to provide me with background documents, which may contain information about the terms of the proposed commercial relationship. Often these terms are based on certain assumptions about the law or about commercial aspects of the deal, I need to test these assumptions both with reference to my understanding of the law and also with reference to the commercial basis on which the client has formed such an assumption.
If I am working for a client in relation to a dispute, I need to perform a similar type of enquiry. Again drilling down into the past conduct of the client with respect to the opposing party and looking at documents which support the client’s position on the historical relationship and also analysing and testing the information provided to me by the client. The credibility and reliability of the client is crucial. We also need to comply with the rules of evidence, otherwise particular facts may not be submitted to the judge for their consideration.
Truth & Lies 8 