In the current macroeconomic cycle, legal risks confronting enterprises are expanding at an unprecedented rate. Commercial disputes have evolved beyond isolated contractual breaches into complex crises intertwining equity battles, cross-border asset recovery, and corporate restructuring. Against this backdrop, corporate C-suites have fundamentally reassessed their legal advisory needs: moving from retaining attorneys as mere statutory interpreters toward seeking strategic risk advisors capable of salvaging commercial value in severe adversity.
To mark International Women’s Day, UWIN sat down with Junxi Lu, Senior Partner and dispute resolution specialist at Kangda Law Firm. In high-stakes disputes touching core assets and enterprise survival, Ms. Lu combines an incisive grasp of commercial fundamentals with decisive strategic execution, demonstrating the professional resilience of female leaders under intense pressure.
Breaking the "5% Threshold": Overturning First-Instance Defeats on Appeal
In commercial litigation, pursuing an appeal following a first-instance defeat is widely viewed as a high-stakes gamble characterized by low win rates and heavy sunk costs.
Judicial trial data released by the Supreme People's Court in early 2026 indicates that amid rising overall caseloads, the rate of first-instance judgments being reversed or remanded for retrial on appeal—alongside the rate of effective judgments being overturned on retrial—continued to decline year-on-year. Furthermore, judicial guidance widely circulated among practitioner circles suggests that appellate reversal and remand rates hover around just 5%, with full reversals representing an even smaller fraction.
Regularly retained on such distressed mandates, Ms. Lu believes the most fatal mistake when handling appeals is falling into path dependency—attempting mere technical patch-ups within the original doctrinal framework.
“After exhaustive adversarial rounds at first instance, the procedural maneuvering room available to appellate counsel is exceptionally narrow,” Ms. Lu explains. “Appellate counsel cannot stop at technical restructuring of statutory applications. They must reconstruct the underlying commercial logic on the factual level, and translate that analysis into persuasive arguments and evidence that an appellate court can substantiate to reverse the judgment. This places extraordinary demands on an appellate attorney's critical thinking, legal mastery, and tactical execution.”
Inside the courtroom, legal reasoning unsupported by a rigorous evidentiary chain is meaningless.
Navigating severe adversity requires litigators to integrate high-level commercial reasoning with disciplined execution—translating intricate business facts into evidentiary chains that align with procedural evidentiary rules and withstand judicial scrutiny. Seamlessly bridging business reality and adjudicative procedure is the decisive lever required to unlock that elusive 5% threshold.
Optimizing the Cross-Border Service Chain: Chinese Counsel as General Contractor Integrators
As Chinese enterprises accelerate global expansion, Ms. Lu’s dispute practice has extended into cross-border jurisdictions, including the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong. Litigating on unfamiliar "away turf" governed by common law principles and divergent procedural rules, where does the core value of Chinese counsel lie?
Ms. Lu observes that when guiding domestic enterprises through cross-border disputes, Chinese counsel bring a profound sense of institutional accountability rooted in long-standing client relationships and mutual trust. This intrinsic drive to place the client's commercial interests first and push for substantive problem-solving represents a decisive soft power—one that is frequently overlooked among highly process-driven international counterparts.
Cross-border litigation functions as a specialized, multi-disciplinary collaborative enterprise. Within this matrix, domestic counsel, foreign co-counsel, and expert witnesses each exercise domain-specific authority.
Cutting Through the Fog: A C-Suite Decision Model for Retaining Appellate Counsel
Following a first-instance loss, corporate leadership often scrambles for certainty. This anxiety drives one of the most common and perilous cognitive biases in legal procurement: demanding that candidate law firms provide an "exhaustive appellate litigation strategy" prior to formal engagement.
From a behavioral economics perspective, corporate decision-makers attempt to mitigate the discomfort of information asymmetry by front-loading strategy. In Ms. Lu's view, however, this decision model is built on sand.
“Before being formally retained, counsel has not commenced substantive document review; no appellate lawyer can command the full factual record beforehand,” Ms. Lu points out. “Offering a definitive, granular appellate roadmap without reviewing the complete evidentiary record is like writing a medical prescription before examining the patient. It may sound appealing, but it lacks clinical foundation. Forcing corporate executives to make pivotal decisions based on an ungrounded hypothesis carries immense risk.”
An even more insidious risk is misaligned procurement criteria. “When executive attention focuses entirely on how clever a proposed theory sounds, leadership often overlooks a far more fundamental question: does the attorney pitching the idea possess the tactical execution capabilities to bring it across the finish line?”
To address this dilemma, Ms. Lu offers corporate leadership three practical benchmarks for vetting appellate counsel:
Prioritize Problem-Solving Architecture Over Win-Rate Promises
Exceptional litigators do not make easy guarantees about final outcomes; they demonstrate analytical depth. Corporate executives should evaluate how candidate counsel deconstructs the foundational flaws of the first-instance ruling, and whether their assessment of appellate challenges is objective, incisive, and unvarnished.
Verify Trial-Tested Track Records Over Institutional Halo Effects
Theoretical legal analysis is no substitute for courtroom combat. The key metric is whether the candidate litigator demonstrates verifiable track records in comparable appellate matters and can articulate a systematic methodology derived from those proceedings.
Evaluate Risk-Sharing and Fee Alignment Structures
In commercial transactions, contractual fee structures speak louder than verbal assurances. Executives should examine whether candidate counsel is willing to structure fee arrangements that demonstrate shared risk and aligned financial incentives. Such alignment reflects confidence in counsel's own professional capabilities and lays the foundation for genuine client trust.
Rationality Foremost: The Strength of Female Leadership in High-Stakes Litigation
Through rigorous technical competence, incisive commercial insight, and disciplined risk governance, Ms. Lu has erected a robust line of defense for corporate clients traversing volatile economic cycles.
Maintaining composure in acute adversity and leveraging professional excellence to redefine the value of commercial litigators—this disciplined resolve represents the most vital and compelling expression of female leadership in today's business environment.
Junxi Lu
Senior Partner, Kangda Law Firm
Junxi Lu joined Kangda Law Firm in 2000 and currently serves as a Senior Partner, Director of Kangda’s Civil and Commercial Dispute Resolution Professional Committee, and Member of the firm’s Human Resources Committee. From 2003 to 2004, she served as a visiting exchange lawyer at Gallant Y.T. Ho & Co. in Hong Kong, broadening her cross-border practice capabilities and international perspective.
Ms. Lu focuses her practice on civil and commercial dispute resolution and corporate legal affairs. She specializes in representing clients facing severe procedural and commercial disadvantages in complex equity disputes, corporate control contests, major contractual disputes, construction claims, and real estate litigation.
Her landmark representations include the high-profile equity transfer dispute between Baofeng Group and Everbright Capital, alongside the protracted series of corporate control contests, equity disputes, and land development claims involving Shanghai Nine Dragon Tourism Co., Ltd. These matters secured favorable legal and commercial outcomes for clients and serve as benchmark precedents in Chinese commercial dispute resolution.
