Zhiheng Characters Issue 06 | Sha Jun Lawyer: Post-90s game-breakers cultivate new digital fields with long-termism
foreword
Eight years of foreign-related business practice, four years of digital finance track pioneering. The lawyer interviewed in this issue, Sha Jun, is a member of Zhiheng Shanghai Management Committee and the president of Zhiheng National Institute of Digital Economy. He has a combined background in law and finance, and is deeply involved in emerging tracks such as Web3 and AI. Witnessing the value logic of traditional legal services being continuously reconstructed by large models and distributed technologies, he jumped out of the comfort zone of mature foreign-related business, found his own professional ecological niche, faced multiple changes in the industry, actively embraced new industrial opportunities, and finally took root in Zhiheng.
He often said with certainty: "The digital economy and hard technology have reached a new historical starting point, and this long-term track is worth five or ten years for lawyers to cultivate." In this exclusive interview, we talked to lawyer Sha Jun together to understand a new economic legal leader with cross-border vision, technical thinking and long-term doctrine.
01Switch tracks and anchor new practice coordinates between trade-offs
Lawyer Sha Jun's practice choices have always kept up with the trend of the times, and each transformation hides the unique sobriety and determination of young lawyers. After officially entering the industry in 2014, Lawyer Sha Jun successfully entered the field of foreign-related legal services, and was an early lawyer in China to serve Chinese-funded enterprises going overseas. Relying on years of extensive accumulation of various foreign-related practices, he has developed a strong pre-risk research and judgment and business landing thinking.
Although it has amassed rich cross-border resources, its shortcomings have become increasingly prominent: mature foreign-related projects require long-term residency abroad, which conflicts with the life planning after starting a family, and the local cannot complete the complete business closed-loop; at the same time, traditional legal services rely on offline connections, legal consultants are difficult to standardize fees, and are easily reduced by customers when the market goes down. Professional scarcity continues to decline.
At the end of 2022, Hong Kong introduced a Web3 support policy, which became a key opportunity for his transformation. Decentralized technology, RWA asset tokenization, cross-border transfer and other new formats have spawned a large number of new compliance needs, and digital legal services can be fully implemented online and locally, perfectly adapting to their own planning.
At that time, there were clear regulatory constraints on virtual assets in the mainland, but the global demand for blockchain business broke out, and Hong Kong's policy implementation speed was ahead of overseas, forming a unique cross-border business window. The threshold in this field is very high, requiring both financial and legal skills, global vision and technical knowledge, and strong cross-cultural communication and collaboration capabilities. Lawyer Sha Jun's compound background is highly matched, so he led the team to fully cultivate the digital economy.
Unlike his peers who follow the trend and chase short-term popularity, Lawyer Sha Jun's transformation logic is very rational. The essence of legal services is to deal with various social relationships. The technological iteration of the digital industry is much faster than the implementation of supervision. Complex lawyers with cross-border legal and technical knowledge are extremely scarce, and there is no shortage of case sources.
During the transition period, he started high-intensity self-study, synchronized research on global digital asset supervision, blockchain underlying logic, etc., combined with his own foreign-related accumulation, built a "cross-border law + digital technology + science and technology innovation finance" composite professional system, and successfully completed the track identity switch. Entering 2026, lawyer Sha Jun made a clear judgment: the digital economy ushered in a new development cycle.
Domestic computing power chips have been commercialized in batches, and the cost advantage of the underlying infrastructure has been highlighted. The industry trough brought about by the high-tech blockade for many years has come to an end; the popularization of the national big model has comprehensively improved social productivity, and the underlying infrastructure of the digital industry has been fully opened up. This trillion-level long-term track is worth investing in the entire career of lawyers in the field of innovation.
02Through industry changes, reshape the value of legal services with product thinking
In the eye of the digital industry revolution, lawyer Sha Jun has a unique and profound thinking about the trend of the industry. In his opinion, the current legal service industry is experiencing three changes: the popularization of AI technology, the explosion of digital business models, the reconstruction of customer payment logic, and sticking to the traditional agent consultation model will only be left behind by the times.
In the early years, legal services were mostly limited to post-event risk disposal, but with the large-scale landing of AI and Web3 industries, market demand has undergone essential changes: private domain digital asset precipitation, enterprise data confirmation and capitalization, data compliance and security settings, etc. Preemptive demand has exploded, and the legal service chain has moved forward significantly.
This puts forward extremely high compound requirements for lawyers: it is not enough to only understand the laws, and it is necessary to understand the underlying technology and business logic in order to find a balance between compliance red lines and enterprise development. Lawyer Sha Jun put forward the view: At present, AI is the main track, and the key for enterprises to complete AI transformation is to accelerate data sorting and application, which happens to be the pre-step for the solid landing of digital asset projects.
AI and Web3 are inextricably linked. In the past, the public generally understood RWA as physical tokenization, which was difficult to implement. The root cause was that most enterprises had not completed basic data informatization and could not form stable cash flow digital assets. The popularization of AI technology was a key factor to make up for the shortcomings.
In the past four months, he himself has also completed the digital transformation of the whole process of the team, undertaking repetitive paperwork, retrieval, and process work with AI internally, reducing labor costs and avoiding manual omissions; precipitating standardized business data streams externally, and transforming them into valuable digital assets under the compliance framework. Combined with his own experience, he mentioned that the information rate of the technology circle is very high, the concepts of AI Agent and X402 micropayment protocol have long been discussed in the Web3 circle, and the rapidly developing AI and technology industry chain have spawned massive new demands. Continuous learning ability is a must for practitioners.
In response to the general anxiety of AI substitution in the industry, he said that AI can complete 90% of the basic work of standardization, but the core judgment capabilities such as complex business dismantling and cross-border compliance architecture design still need to rely on years of practical accumulation, and cannot be replaced by technology in the short term.
He also mentioned that the payment logic of customers in the market has changed significantly. Customers only pay for rigid needs and quantifiable value, and shallow consulting is difficult to stabilize and monetize. Only when products and services are scarce can they get rid of low prices. Lawyers in the new era cannot simply provide opinions from the perspective of "agents". It is recommended to participate more from the perspective of "masters" of business operations, and establish long-term cooperation through professional establishment to share risks and grow together with enterprises.
03Rooted in Zhiheng 3.0 to achieve win-win under the platform empowerment
In 2025, lawyer Sha Jun officially joined Zhiheng Shanghai and Zhiheng Hong Kong. At that time, he had a mature digital business system, and many platforms offered olive branches. He finally chose Zhiheng, mainly to recognize the cultural concept of
and show the high-spirited and upward development atmosphere. At present, Zhiheng has entered the 3.0 high-quality development stage after large-scale expansion. The core strategy is to recruit industry experts in various fields, build a bottom-up innovation incubation mechanism, open API resources, absorb lawyers' innovative business ideas, and attract outstanding talents to each other, forming a positive growth cycle.
Open and inclusive platform culture, full support for partners to build characteristic professional research institutes, which is highly consistent with lawyer Sha Jun's plan to create a vertical professional matrix. He also emphasized that one of the things that attracted him to Zhiheng was the perfect mid-platform operation system. In the past, holding industry salons and operating self-media required teams to undertake alone. In Zhiheng, administrative, brand, marketing, finance and other mid-platform assistance throughout the process, lawyers can concentrate on professional research, product polishing and Client Server, without having to spend energy dealing with complicated operational chores.
Relying on the support of the platform, lawyer Sha Jun led the establishment of Zhiheng Web3 Research Institute (now upgraded to Zhiheng National Digital Economy Research Institute), which is different from traditional business sectors such as criminal and execution, accurately focuses on AI, Web3, hard technology digital compliance track, opens up the resources of national branches, and realizes cross-business collaboration: criminal team undertakes digital asset criminal business, foreign-related team builds cross-border digital architecture, capital markets team docks RWA asset tokenization, and opens up new business increments for Zhiheng system.
Zhiheng's national linkage advantage is huge. Relying on the national unified branding, the research institute successfully landed multiple RWA compliance closed-door meetings and digital industry ecological strategic cooperation, docked a large number of science and technology innovation enterprises and industry associations, and quickly established the influence of the sub-track industry; lawyers in various branches can rely on the research institute to learn cutting-edge business in the digital field, and the research institute can also use local outlets to mine local science and technology innovation customers, expand business channels in both directions, and break the regional business ceiling.
In Zhiheng, lawyer Sha Jun enjoys the atmosphere of talent symbiosis very much. The platform continues to attract top experts in various fields, senior partners and young lawyers communicate and collide regularly, traditional business and digital emerging business inspire each other, two-way learning, empowering each other, continuously updating their professional cognition, and achieving simultaneous growth of individuals and teams.
04The team goes to the blue ocean together to create the future with love
When it comes to Zhiheng Shanghai's development prospects and ideal peers, lawyer Sha Jun clearly outlines the portrait of talents who are suitable for the digital track. Lawyers who want to deepen their careers in the field of digital technology must possess the core characteristics: strong continuous learning ability, adapting to the high-speed iteration of technology and policies, and an open and inclusive mindset, jumping out of the inherent thinking of traditional legal services.
The Zhiheng Shanghai 3.0 platform just provides a complete fertile ground for such innovative legal persons to grow: the digital economy track has sufficient policy dividends, multiple experts and talents are exchanged, innovative businesses can be incubated, and the national global resource network is fully covered. Traditional criminal, capital markets, and foreign-related lawyers can also link the research institute to expand new digital compliance businesses and realize the transformation and upgrading of the original track.
Facing the future, Sha Jun lawyers have a clear and landing development blueprint. In the short term, we will rely on Zhiheng's national network to undertake and link cutting-edge digital compliance projects across the country and even cross-border. We will continue to complete a comprehensive upgrade of the team organization model. The current team relies on industry enthusiasm and cohesion. In the future, we will rely on Zhiheng platform resources and AI comprehensive technology to empower, polish the standardized long-term operation model, and create a professional organization of "one person becomes an army and coordinated attack".
Each lawyer can independently undertake the whole chain of digital compliance business, and the law firm works together to provide comprehensive legal services for large groups, listed companies, and international institutions, forming a comprehensive competitiveness that is difficult to match for small independent teams. The long-term goal is to build a benchmark compliance team in the domestic digital economy and establish a leading brand in the sub-track.
In terms of personal growth, he will continue to export industry research and iterate standardized and compliant products, and prove through his own practice that young lawyers can achieve long-term and stable development by relying on high-quality platforms to deepen their fields, opening up a new growth path for post-90s new economic lawyers.
05conclusion
The legal service industry is standing a*******torical turning point between the old and the new. The traditional business logic is continuously reshaped by digital technology. Only by keeping up with the trend of the times, with both professional depth and forward-looking vision, can we seize the new round of industrial dividends. Sha Jun's career path of eight years of cross-border bottoming and four years of digital pioneering is a vivid example of young lawyers actively embracing the opportunities of the times.
Zhiheng 3.0 era is not only a large-scale comprehensive institute, but also a fertile ground for empowering lawyers to innovate and cultivate deep and link national resources. For legal professionals who are willing to continue to learn and deeply cultivate emerging fields, Zhiheng provides perfect resources and open mechanisms. In the future, we will continue to work side by side with industry pioneers to go to the new blue ocean of digital economy legal services.