Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
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PROFILE By Vawn Himmelsbach Kou bridges the gap between Asia and the West Speaking a handful of languages has helped lawyer raised in Quebec go international with mining giant Rio Tinto Alcan. As chief counsel for Rio Tinto Alcan, Vincent Kou oversees the compa- ny's legal affairs across Asia, from China to India. He's come a long way since he fled Cambodia at the age of nine with his mother to escape the totalitarian Khmer Rouge regime — a regime in which social engineering and mass genocide wiped out one-third of the country's population during the 1970s. Mother and son arrived in Canada as refugees in the early 1980s and built a new life for themselves in Témiscaming in northern Quebec. "All I knew was I wanted to be a lawyer," says Kou. "What type of lawyer I wasn't sure of yet." With a keen interest in history, politics, and literature, Kou attended law school at the University of Sherbrooke and was called to the Quebec bar in 1997. He articled at the Quebec Securities Commission with a focus on securities law, then landed a job with Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP where he worked for two years. After moving to Canada, he never left the country, yet in the late '90s he recognized China was becoming a more important player on the global stage. "I realized that we had a lot of good securi- ties lawyers in the firm and in the coun- try, but something was missing as China If you look at risk from a traditional way in the western business world, it's very diffi cult doing business in Asia. It's not about eliminating risk but understanding the risk and mitigating it, and that's probably the best way to survive and compete in the Asian market. VINCENT KOU, Rio Tinto Alcan INHOUSE JUNE 2010 • 47