Some careers accumulate titles. Alan Tse’s career accumulates responsibility, quietly, industry after industry, until the scope of what he oversees becomes almost startling to say out loud.
Since June 2018, Alan Tse has served as Global Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary of JLL, a Fortune 500 commercial real estate services and investment management company with a global workforce of more than 113,000 people as of the end of 2025. He has now been in the role for more than eight years, based in the Greater Chicago area, and the scope of his current mandate is unusually wide even for a global chief legal officer. Beyond JLL’s global Legal and Compliance functions, his responsibilities also extend to Internal Audit, Risk, and Business Continuity.
Building Toward It, One Industry at a Time
Alan’s path to that seat ran through a sequence of general counsel roles across strikingly different industries, each one adding scale and complexity to the last. Immediately before JLL, he spent one year and eight months as Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary at Petco, from November 2016 to June 2018. There, he led the company’s legal and regulatory affairs.
Before Petco, he spent five years and nine months as Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary at Churchill Downs, from March 2011 to November 2016, based in the Louisville metropolitan area, where he served as chief legal officer of a sports and gaming company that includes the Kentucky Derby among its holdings. His responsibilities included legal, corporate governance, and compliance matters.
Earlier still, he spent six years and four months as Vice President and General Counsel at LG Electronics MobileComm, from January 2005 to April 2011, serving as chief legal officer for LG’s North American mobile phone business, which had annual sales of more than $6 billion during his tenure.
The Earlier Chapters
His first general counsel titles came even earlier. He spent two years and one month as VP and General Counsel at Ligos Corporation, from January 2003 to January 2005, and before that, two years and four months as VP of Strategic Development and General Counsel at Centerpoint Broadband Technologies, from April 2000 to July 2002. He entered private practice in 1997 with Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison LLP, where his work focused on corporate and securities matters for clients in the technology and venture capital sectors.
The Shape of the Career
Line up Alan’s resume end to end, and a clear shape emerges: broadband technology, telecommunications, sports and gaming, pet retail, and finally, global commercial real estate – five industries, multiple general counsel roles, each one expanding the scale and complexity of his mandate. It is the career of someone who treats industry as incidental to the actual job, which is building legal, risk, and compliance functions capable of supporting a company’s growth, no matter what that company happens to sell.
At JLL, that philosophy now operates at a scale few legal chiefs ever reach, spanning legal, compliance, internal audit, risk, and business continuity for a company with more than 113,000 employees and operations in more than 80 countries.
