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Spotlight:
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Q: Please tell us about your current role and how you got to where you are today.
A: I am currently the head of legal and company secretary for Ocean Winds, or OW, in Korea. OW is an offshore wind developer and operator headquartered in Madrid. In my roles, I advise the board of directors on, and manage, all legal matters including, but not limited to, permitting, local consent, EPCI contracts, disputes, government affairs, M&A, project financing, tenders, joint development, company governance, regulatory compliance, fair trade, etc.
I set foot in the energy space when I joined MVA’s energy team, which was within the litigation group at the time. I had the pleasure of training under Brian Heslin who is now Duke Energy’s Deputy General Counsel. I cut my teeth on high profile matters working with Brian including FERC pre-filing settlements, anti-manipulation investigations, midstream transactions, and PHMSA-related matters. Working on the broader litigation team, I also had the opportunity to assist Neil Bloomfield with an AML investigation right before moving back to Seoul.
I remember attending a meeting with a client’s executives with Brian, and crossing the pond to conduct on-site due diligence for the matter headed by Neil. Both experiences at MVA, among others, helped me prepare for the subsequent transition to an in-house role. After MVA, I went on to earn my LLM on Energy Law in Texas where I fell in love with wind energy. After nearly 4 years working in-house for a Hyundai affiliate in Seoul, OW hired me to manage its legal team in Korea.
Q: What are three keys to your professional success?
A: I would say ownership, insight, and audacity.
- Ownership: Treat every case like your own. A good in-house lawyer should remain risk averse, immersed into the business, meticulous, and hands-on despite the temptation to outsource or rubber stamp. I often ask junior attorneys: Would you hire you to represent your family?
- Insight: Read between the lines and fill in the gaps. Interfacing is a valuable component of lawyering. Whether grounded in misunderstandings, missing facts or assumptions, cultural differences, etc., people often refer to the same thing but mean different things. A good lawyer should keep an eye out to catch this and bring the company’s and its counterparty’s interests closer to reach an amicable solution.
- Audacity: Don’t be afraid to make waves. There is no need to pick fights, but a people pleaser may inadvertently injure the interest of the company. Like most things, it’s a balancing act, but you need to be bold to assert findings and conclusions based on your “insights” on the matters that you have taken “ownership” of.
I still have a long way to go. And so, with the aim to mature as a professional, I consciously try to find a genuine solution by digging deep to identify the true cause of a problem as if it’s my own problem.
Q: At many firms, there has been a trend for bringing more legal work in-house and reducing the reliance on outside counsel. Is your firm a part of this trend, and if so, what have been the benefits and challenges?
A: OW has a more robust and sizable in-house legal team than other major offshore wind developers in Korea. This was due to our realization that external counsels cannot provide effective advice at times because not all material background information is available to them. Knowing the history enables us to identify the key issues, pick out the pertinent facts from a plethora of shared information, and pump out a solution that is more likely to be satisfactory to the board and the shareholders.
As necessary and appropriate, however, we also tap into the much greater resources and combined experience of top-tier law firms for objective opinions. Some of the Gen Z readers may not know the quote, but the line “you complete me” from the movie Jerry Maguire comes to mind.
Thank you for reading and the opportunity to share my experience.