Alan Tse
Jones Lang LaSalle
"I thought about it for 30 seconds and I told her, 'You know, I've been unqualified before and somehow been successful,'" he said.
Just a few months into the role, he handled JLL's biggest acquisition ever: the $2 billion merger with brokerage firm HFF. The deal was fast-paced and complicated — more like dozens of little deals than one big deal, he said. But Tse, who put himself through college as a nationally ranked chess master and coach, savors a challenge.
"The reason I left a law firm to go in-house in the first place was exactly this," said Tse, the company's global chief legal officer. "Think about an acquisition. I think of it in three parts: picking the company to buy, doing the deal and then integrating the company. As a lawyer in a law firm, I was doing the middle part, and I would argue the least-important part."
Tse, who is actively involved in the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, is among 13 corporate counsel named Legends in Law by the Burton Awards this year. A lawyer who nominated Tse cited his skill as an attorney and his dedication to improving the profession by hiring and elevating diverse talent.
"As a lawyer, Alan is supremely capable and talented, one of the most talented GCs we've worked with," wrote Sidley Austin LLP partner Brian Fahrney, who nominated Tse for the honor. "He has worked hard to develop himself into a great all-around lawyer and business counselor, and his depth of knowledge in a wide variety of areas is remarkable."
The Burton Awards' 2020 ceremony was slated to be held at the Library of Congress in June, but it was canceled because of the coronavirus. The next ceremony is scheduled for June 14, 2021. Law360 is a sponsor of the Burton Awards.
Tse, a 1997 gradudate of Harvard Law School, began his career at Brobeck Phleger & Harrison LLP. He went in-house at Centerpoint Broadband Technologies Inc. and took general counsel jobs at Ligos Corp., LG Electronics MobileComm, Churchill Downs and Petco before landing at Jones Lang LaSalle.
In his current role, one of the most challenging parts of handling the HFF merger was ensuring that HFF's people were also happy with the terms of the deal. Failure to integrate them into Jones Lang LaSalle would have ultimately rendered the $2 billion deal almost worthless, he said.
The coronavirus pandemic has slowed the travel associated with the general counsel's job in a marked change compared to past years. Tse said he logged about 400,000 air miles in his first year after joining Jones Lang LaSalle in 2018 as he traveled to company sites in Europe, Asia and Australia.
--Editing by Kelly Duncan and Jill Coffey.
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