American lawyer dedicated to Chinese law industry for 13 years

American lawyer dedicated to Chinese law industry for 13 years

Elegant and affable is the first impression Meg Utterback, an American female lawyer, makes on us. Meg came to China to study in the 1980s. After graduation she went back to America. Many years later, she returned to China and has been working and living here for more than ten years.

Meg has an interview with Eastday

13 years of witnessing the development of Chinese law

In the late 1970s, China began to gradually open its door. The first Sino-foreign Joint Venture Law was promulgated in 1979. The surge of foreign investment in China led Meg to feel that this would be a time of great change, so she was determined to go to China to study and research in the law field. After graduating from McGill University in 1985, she came to China’s Renmin University, where she spent two years doing graduate studies.

The simple life is Meg’s deepest memory of her graduate student life in China. She explained that everything in the school was simple. Supplies were scarce in the whole of Beijing and there were very few cars. People rode bikes or got on the public buses."Today's material goods are very rich. I can drive a BMW and go to any nice restaurant I want to and order all types of food. And in 1985, if you went to a restaurant, you would say 'I want this and that' and they would say,'we don’t have this, we don’t have that. We have tomato only' she smiled, with the words full of reminiscence.

After graduating from Renmin University in 1987, Meg returned to the United States. In 2005, since the US law firm she was working for planned to open a representative office in Shanghai, she was fortunate to be appointed here as the person in charge. Five years later, she made another major decision to join a Chinese law firm, King & Wood Law Firm."I never thought that China would develop so fast, and I could be so successful in the Chinese legal profession as a foreign lawyer," Meg said sincerely.