Virginia Tam

Advisor

Virginia is an equity partner in K&L Gates LLP, an international firm based in the United States with 45 offices in major financial centres worldwide. Educated in the Columbia University School of Law and trained in New York, Virginia has more than 20 years of experience practising U.S. and Hong Kong corporate and securities laws. She is currently based in Hong Kong, her home town.

Virginia has a background in computational physics, with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Cambridge and a master’s degree from Yale University. She started her legal career in Asia in the early 2000 representing Taiwan technology companies in their cross-border financings. Her day-to-day work required her to deconstruct the businesses of her clients using critical thinking and reconstruct them into layman languages for investors. She gained valuable insight into the technology industry from a business angle as a result.

Virginia understands the needs of the legal industry from the perspectives of a practitioner (how technology could make work products better), teacher (distinguishing tasks that are essential to skillset development from tasks that are mundane), business person (how projects can be handled quickly using fewer resources), and customer (identifying third party services that are accretive to the practice). She has contacts in many international firms and knows their “language”. Both would add value to product marketing.

Virginia spends most of her spare time as an urban sketcher, painter and IKEA hacker. She has recently completed a part time master’s program in fine arts. Contemporary art gives her a conduit to express her original thinking. DIY projects gives her the opportunity to develop her innovation.

Virginia wants to leverage her logical and creative personality traits and experience as a lawyer in A.l. venture projects. She is keen to collaborate with computer scientists and engineers to develop products that would meet the needs of the transactional practice of the legal industry. This segment typically accounts for a majority of revenues of major law firms and is currently underserved by A.l. developers in the legal industry. Unlike A.l. products developed for the litigation practice; products developed for use in corporate law projects can be modified with only minimal changes to suit the needs of many other industries in the commerce chain.