Back when China Law Blog was a young pup, the Wall Street Journal Blog referenced one of our posts and we went all Sally Fields about that. We ran a post, entitled, “The Wall Street Journal — They Like Us. They Really Like Us,” the sole purpose of which (near as I can tell nearly six years later) was to let everyone know that the Wall Street Journal had noticed us. We are, of course, far too cool/wise/jaded/experienced/old to act that way now.
Or so I thought until I read a post on theContractsGuy Blog, entitled, “The Reading List: China Law Blog.“
The author of that post, St. Louis business lawyer, Brian Rogers, so totally understands this blog that his post felt like confirmation of what we are seeking to achieve here. In addition to that (or better yet, because of that), Rogers’ post does a phenomenal job listing out what are probably our best (or at least most practical/helpful) posts for 2011.
I am not going to list all the posts Rogers lists because i want to make sure you read his entire post, but I am going to state how delighted I was to learn that his favorite post “by far” was China Manufacturing Agreements. Watching The Sausage Get Made, which he describes as follows:
The post consists simply of a pair of sanitized client emails. One explains the typical contents of a Chinese manufacturing agreement, along with a discussion of important issues to consider. The other email accompanied the initial draft of a manufacturing contract. They’re pieces of commercial transaction art, clearly explaining the significant issues the client should consider and providing salient commercial and legal advice.
I too loved that post because it consisted pretty much entirely of emails co-blogger Steve Dickinson had sent to a client and all I had to do was remove any client identifiers and then post it. In other words, the post was the essence of what we as China lawyers do pretty much every day. Then to have a fellow lawyer appreciate that is — to me — one of the highest compliments we could ever get.
Whenever someone thanks me for highlighting on our blog something they have written elsewhere, I demur by saying that I should be thanking them instead. I say this because we mention and link to other writings not as a favor to their authors, but because we think the writings are interesting and worth reading and we want to bring them to the attention of our readers. So for this reason, I am not going to thank theContractsGuy for highlighting our blog on his blog.
Instead I am going to thank him for making my day. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
