On the eve of “double festival” – National Day Holiday and Mid-Autumn Festival, a big news hits Winners. As appointed by the management committee of Winners Law firm, Lawyer Caidan Cao is now the Chief of Beijing Office and fully in charge of the operation, management and professional work. Before joining Winners Law Firm Ms.Cao worked as the former General Counsel of Greenpeace East Asia Regional Office, an international environmental protection organization.
From 2001 to 2005, Lawyer Caidan Cao studied at North University of China and obtained Bachelor Degree of Law (LL.B) and Bachelor Degree of Engineering. From 2008 to 2011, she studied at Lund University in Sweden and obtained Master of Laws in Intellectual Property Law and Human Rights Law (LL.M) and Master of Science in Society, Science and Technology. From 2018 to 2019, she studied at the law school of Stanford University and obtained her Master of Laws (LL.M) in Environmental Law and Policy. While studying at Stanford Law School, she worked as the editor of the Stanford Environmental Law Journal. She also completed the MBA Ignite program at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In addition, she has completed certified legal training in International Private Law at the Hague Academy of International Law in the Netherlands, and the certified legal training in Intellectual Property Law in the World Intellectual Property Organization in Switzerland. She also interned with the United Nations Headquarters in New York, and clerked with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. In her previous work she has intensively conducted legal research in numerous international projects and engaged in the draft of international treaties and instruments.
Lawyer Caidan Cao
graduated from Stanford University
Lawyer Caidan Cao clerked with the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia
Before joining Winners Law firm, lawyer Caidan Cao worked as the General Counsel of Greenpeace East Asia. Over the past eight years, she gradually developed the multi-jurisdictional legal team in East Asia from Beijing to Hong Kong, Taipei and Seoul, and managed cross-border legal work involving both common law and civil law jurisdictions. She has been dedicated to promoting the environmental legislation and policy-making. She has solid legal knowledge, professional lawyering skills and legal experience, as well as great leadership and management skills. Furthermore, she is capable of and experienced in cooperating and communicating with different stakeholders: government departments, international organizations, think tanks, academic institutions and multinational corporations.
Lawyer Caidan Cao received Winners Law Firm executive team at Greenpeace's Hong Kong office in September 2017
The main practice area of lawyer Caidan Cao is environment and energy. She has rich experience in handling regulatory matters and legal compliance with environmental and energy laws and policies, energy projects and financing, climate change and green finance, environmental and energy litigation, and international energy cooperation.
Why join Winners Law Firm? Lawyer Caidan Cao said: joining Winners Law Firm is an important milestone in her career. From this starting point, her journey to become a top environmental and energy lawyer has begun. The Energy Law of P.R.C, as the first comprehensive energy basic law, has solicited public opinions and may soon be promulgated. To lawyers, this is a great opportunity. In future those lawyers with both business knowledge of energy industry as well as professional legal knowledge of environmental and energy laws and policies will be needed. In such an area crossing both traditional laws and emerging cutting-edge issues, the legal service and competent legal talents become market demand. In the past years, the environmental law team of Winners Law Firm has received national Tier 1 Ranking in Best Environmental Lawyers by Chambers & Partners and other legal rankings. It is a great honor to work with such a professional team to advance and develop the group of environmental and energy lawyers.
The energy industry along with its interconnected industries in the upstream and downstream stand as top priority of the national long-term development. The development of new energy resources drives the direction of promoting the technological innovation and energy transformation of strategic emerging industries in China. It is also the leverage for China not only to tackle energy and environmental problems, but also to combat climate change and fulfill the commitment of energy conservation and emission reduction to the international community. Ms.Cao said that she has intensively engaged in the legal work for many years aiming to promote the development of the new energy industry, including advocating forward-looking legislation and policies that support the development of the new energy industry, initiating energy lawsuits against curtailment of renewable energy generation, providing legal advice on new energy financing projects exploring investment and financing channels to resolve funding bottleneck, advising the legal issues arising from technological innovation of renewable energy power generation and grid connection, and promoting environmental compliance and legal risk management in the energy industry. Those work enabled her to understand energy industry well, and particularly have an insight to those legal issues concerning both energy and environment. However, the previous work focused on the laws and industrial policies advancing energy transformation and growing at a relatively macro level. It is very challenging to carry out legal work in a down-to-earth manner. Sometimes there is a big gap between legislation and policy and the actual law enforcement. It takes patience to see the changes. Lawyer Caidan Cao said that as early as three years ago, she began to think about how to find more effective ways to promote energy reform, energy conservation, emission reduction and environmental protection.
While studying at Stanford Law School, Ms. Cao systematically studied environmental law, energy law and natural resource law of the United States. She also learned about the business model and regulatory situation of energy industry in the United States. As the cradle of Silicon Valley, Stanford University is known for its effort to train students on innovation, leadership and entrepreneurship. Therefore, she had the chance to witness how those entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley change and reform an industry through business innovation. The study experience has inspired her a lot. Ms.Cao hopes that, as a business lawyer, she has opportunities to understand and involve herself in the practical business operation of energy corporations. No matter in regulatory and legal compliance or the innovation of technology and business model, she wants to help the energy corporations to seek sustainable development and go further by offering her legal knowledge and expertise.