Message from the CEO

In 2014, I ran a law office in Shanghai. A year later, I shut it down.

The official explanation was poor management. The real reason was that I discovered the numbers I was looking at were not real.

I do not intend to retell that year in detail. What I want to talk about is what it left me with — and it turned out to be something different from what I first thought.

At first, I took the lesson to be "do not trust people who lie." It took me years to see that the real problem is not truth or lies. The problem is people who, from beginning to end, speak only from their own position.

As long as someone stands in his own position, his truths and his lies point in the same direction — the direction that serves him. Truth, therefore, is no protection. What you need is someone willing to move to where you stand before saying a word.

The distance between those two things is far greater than the distance between honesty and dishonesty.

Over the years, in Thailand and in Vietnam, I have watched the same story play out more times than I can count.

Someone brings me a contract, believing in the freehold title it promises. The other party never lied — he simply stood in his own position and told a truth that served him. Whether the courts had already struck down that kind of arrangement was never something his position required him to consider.

In Thailand, others have been persuaded to hold land under a local person's name, assured that "everyone does it this way." That statement, too, is true.

At the moment they signed, not one person around them was standing where they stood.

The person I was in 2014 — that was them.

After that failure, finding the right people became my most important work. I was not looking for the most capable people; I was looking for people willing to think from someone else's position. That standard is far harder to verify than competence, and it took me many years.

When our firm was founded in 2013, I was employee number one, serving clients in intellectual property matters. Today we have offices in eight cities across four countries — and every step of that path came from the same test.

In 2017, we opened an office in Tokyo. I do not speak Japanese. What I could do was find a partner willing to stand in our clients' position on my behalf, then stay on the ground for the long term and keep the relationship alive. That experience taught me that the core of cross-border work has never been language skills — it is whether you dare to place your client in someone's hands.

In 2019, we went to Bangkok. Language, culture, market competition — those years were not easy. Today, Louis & Partners Thailand is the best-known law firm in Thailand's Taiwanese community.

In 2022, in the middle of the pandemic, we entered Vietnam, finding lawyer teams for the north in Hanoi and for the south in Ho Chi Minh City. We established the Louis & Partners Vietnam consulting company, which operates in alliance with the Louis & Partners Vietnam law firm.

In 2024, two firms in Taiwan signed a merger agreement to form Louis & Charles Attorneys at Law, and I took on the role of managing partner.

These years can look like a report card. To me they are not. They are one question being answered over and over: what must a firm become so that its clients, its partners, and its people never have to go through what I went through in 2014?

My answer is that what we demand of ourselves is not honesty. Honesty is too low a bar.

What we demand is that before we speak, we change positions first: if I were the client, what would I most need to know right now?

In practice, this is not a comfortable discipline, because it often points to answers that work against us as lawyers. It means sometimes telling a client that a contract has serious problems, even when saying so stops the deal. It means saying that a structure is not a tax technique but a criminal risk, even when the client would rather hear something else. And it means that when an opinion we published years ago is no longer correct because the law has changed, we go back and correct it, rather than leave it online to mislead people.

Standing in our own position, none of this would need to be said.

We say it anyway.

If you are considering taking your business, your assets, or the next chapter of your life to another country, here is what I hope you will find at Louis Group:

1. Advice spoken from your position. Not from ours — including the advice that costs us the engagement.
2. A team that works across languages and cultures. Our Taiwanese lawyers understand your situation at home; our teams in Thailand and Vietnam understand how local law actually works. You should not have to be your own translator between two languages and two legal systems.
3. Help before you decide or sign. Not after.

We are more than fifty lawyers and consultants across Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. What matters to me is not how large that number grows, but whether, looking back ten years from now, we are still speaking from our clients' position.

That year in Shanghai, no one stood where I stood.

Today, we stand where you stand.

Raymond Yu | Chief Executive Officer, Louis Group