In the fast-changing world of e-commerce, the legal challenges can be myriad and diverse. One of the fastest growing companies in the space is JD.com, one of China’s e-commerce services giants. 

China Legal Business spoke to Jiao Jiao, who heads up the legal department at JD.com to find out what are the most significant challenges ahead for her and her team and how one of China’s most successful companies leverages its legal team to facilitate growth. 

ALB: How you find it different and challenging, working as a legal professional in an e-commerce company? 

Jiao: One thing that makes e-commerce stand out is that it develops so fast. China now has the world’s largest and fastest-growing e-commerce market. JD.com as the top-notched (e-commerce market) in the industry has kept growing, not only in revenue but also exploring new business. 

We need to become familiar with the industry and our company’s fast-growing business in order to provide proper legal advice and solutions. 

At the same time, it is not possible that the legal team can just keep snowballing. So efficiency plays a critical role here. 

ALB: As the leader of the legal department, how do you cope with the challenges? 

Jiao: Liberating the human resources of our department from basic and routine legal work. For example, we have widely pushed the digitalization of contract compliance. In 2016, 95 percent of JD.com’s contracts were reviewed and approved by an automatic system pre-set up and prepared by our legal staff. It substantially frees our hands so that we can pay more attention to those (tasks) that need extra notes. 

We’ve also launched a platform that can answer our internal legal inquiries in real time. It includes those questions asked frequently. 

Benefiting from those technologies, we have more time to participate in independent projects, for example, JD.com’s mergers and investment. Our group has been actively in equity market-related projects, such as our partnerships with Walmart and Tencent as well as our IPO in the U.S. Only through attending the projects directly and working closely with different departments, we can identify potential legal risks and provide useful solutions to their questions, instead of just being a porter of obscure laws and regulations. 

ALB: JD.com seems to pay much attention to putting in place systems to facilitate the operation of the legal department but these systems can be expensive. Does the legal department create value for JD.com?

Jiao: Pre-event risk management is quite critical to a company. If it does not have a mature mechanism to closely follow the changing regulatory environment and manage legal risks, it will experience a haemorrhage once it gets punished for not complying with related rules. This is the way, traditionally, how a legal team contributes to a company. 

Meanwhile, I am trying to take up more responsibilities in the company’s development strategies. For example, JD.com has set our next 12-year goal as “technology leads the future.” The group is going to explore more areas about hi-tech, innovation as well as big data. Echoing that, our legal team is actively preparing in that area as well, including understanding related regulations and policies and specializing in intellectual property (IP) practices, in particular. 

ALB: To engage more with the company’s business, working with other departments is inevitable. Do you find any hurdles there? 

Jiao: It’s true that JD.com’s legal team is working quite close with other departments. For example, JD.com now does not only operate in e-commerce, but we also invest in other sectors. Whenever the company starts to explore a new area, at least one of our legal team will join it from day one. One of the project managers told me that if he puts in a way that he is staff No. 1 on that project, then our legal team colleague is staff No. 2. 

I cannot say that there are no issues regarding communication with other teams but we surely pay a lot of attention to that. 

One important lesson we have learnt is that we need to pay attention to the way we talk. We realized that one key factor leading to those communication bumps is that we work in different language systems. We have our jargon while other departments have theirs. There will be no problem using them within our department, yet that may largely reduce the efficiency. There would be back and forth as vague terms may cause confusion. 

ALB: As the leader of JD.com’s legal department, looking forward, what do you think will be the key ingredients to help upgrade your team?

Jiao: That would be optimizing the organizational structure. As I mentioned, we will have our talents become more specialized in IP. It is an example of our direction – besides routine legal work, like document compliance, we want to move upward as a more professionalized legal service provider. Currently, there are four areas that we are aiming to explore deeper, besides IP, the other three are investments and mergers, dispute settlement and policy interpretation.