Dr. Leon Lee (Yong Li)

Advisor, SINOTALKS^®
Founder & Managing Partner, Sequoia Smith Partners

Dr. Leon Lee founded Sequoia Smith Partners in Beijing in early 2020 and has since then been serving as the firm’s managing partner.  Sequoia Smith Partners provides international and domestic clients with various commercial legal services, including investment and financing in industrial fields, outbound and inbound bank financing, dispute resolution, compliance matters, and issues relating to white-collar and economic crime.

Prior to the founding of the law firm, Dr. Lee taught law at the Law School of the Central University of Finance and Economics (“CUFE”) beginning in 2006, when he graduated from Tsinghua University Law School’s Ph.D. program.  During his tenure at the CUFE, Dr. Lee founded the Case Law Research Center of the CUFE, with the support of Stanford Law School’s China Guiding Cases Project and the Supreme People’s Court of China’s Research Department.  He served as the executive director of the center until his resignation from the CUFE.  The center aims at providing studies of judicial cases so that courts and government agencies can refer to relevant practices and theories during their policy-making and legislative processes.  Since its founding, the center has promoted a series of research activities, including a major research project titled “Research on Tort Liability under the Shared Business Model”, which the Supreme People’s Court entrusted the center to undertake in 2018.  

At the CUFE, Dr. Lee primarily taught courses on company law, international economic law, and legal practice.  He has published more than 20 articles in various journals.