Team size: 12

What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

One of my value-add is to reduce legal spending, by hiring the right people in my team and by upskilling the team appropriately. For example, many in-house legal teams engage with external counsel or hire a dedicated data protection counsel to deal with data protection laws or issues. However, I ensured that key members of my team are trained to manage data protection laws across 13 countries that Avnet does business in within APAC, by attending law firm seminars, getting CIPP/A accredited or reading from legitimate sources online. In particular, when the China data protection laws came into effect in 2021, we managed everything in-house. We worked cross-functionally with the IT teams, marketing and communications teams, and operations teams to understand the volume of personal data involved, trace where it goes and where it is stored, did data protection impact assessments and developed processes and policies on getting proper individual consents.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

Strategy is important. With strategic thinking and regular communications with various departments, one can anticipate potential legal challenges during a crisis.

Then, when a crisis happens, it is important to have a rapid response to the event. While we do legal risk management, such as reviewing existing contract terms, regulations around the world, and liability management, it is also imperative that the legal team understands flexibility. In times of crisis, it is often an event that has never happened before – take for example, 2020 covid and most recently 2025 global tariffs, one needs to be agile in the legal solutions in order to steer the company in the right direction and ensure the company’s resilience in these fluid times.

Finally, communication. When a plan is developed after risk assessments and internal consensus, we should provide a clear, concise and timely legal guidance to not only stakeholders, but to the employees who do the daily work for the company.

What strategies do you employ to ensure the successful digital transformation of a legal department while maintaining compliance with your country’s data protection laws?

I am a big fan of automation. Whenever I need to conduct trainings, I use Workday and Microsoft Teams to send notifications, calendar invites, track registrations and attendance of trainings. This greatly reduces the manual process involved in organising training to thousands of employees. I am also currently involved in working with the Avnet operations team to automate declaration statements from customers in relation to trade compliance. Rather than having customers sign off on forms and uploading onto the system, it would cut processing time if existing tools like SAP or Salesforce can be used to obtain declarations electronically from customers. The same automation can be used to obtain personal data consents from our customers and suppliers. With important processes using the same system and stored in the same platform, it ensures consistency and good data recording.

My legal team also volunteered to participate in a proof of concept for Microsoft Viva Insights to see if it can help manage our weeks or track effectiveness in using various tools provided at work. I believe that using the right innovative tools and AI can enhance the work and support that my team and I provide to Avnet.

Given that contracts work forms the bulk of my team’s time, I am a big proponent of using contracts management software to store contracts and using it to analyze trends for contracts work. It is not enough that on-going contracts uses the software; my goal is also to slowly (but surely) transfer the contracts from the past decades from hard copies to soft copies. This allows my legal team to pull out relevant contracts suited for the business needs, and review historical negotiations with external parties.

General counsel often speak of the need to be strategic to reach the pinnacle of the profession. What does being strategic mean to you?

As the General Counsel in Avnet Asia, I have to provide a strong functional leadership and create line-of-sight linkage to the company and business strategic objectives. Whatever I do, I ensure regular, transparent two-way communication by attending monthly executive leaders meetings, APAC quarterly business reviews, and planning meetings with internal functions to align the corporate functions goals with the business needs. I also collaborate with operations and finance teams to develop templates such as anti-money laundering measures.

I also ensure that my team understands company and business objectives by keeping them abreast of strategic goals. This allows the company to have first-rate legal support. An example of what my legal team does include providing regular trainings to 3000+ employees on hot legal topics. Training is the cornerstone of compliance and a first step to putting the legal team in the front lines to assist the business. The trainings were so successful within Avnet that there were requests to conduct small group face-to-face trainings to business teams, on business budgets.

I also do analysis of legal support requests on a monthly basis. This ensures that legal resources are well placed, contract templates are relevant, and legal/business processes make sense to the successful operations of the company.

As a result of this strategy to help my company, the legal department is not seen as an impediment to doing business (a common complaint about in-house counsels) but is a trusted business partner whom the business and other functions have no hesitation to reach out to whenever there are new business models, or any legal queries.

What have you done to further diversity objectives in your organisation?

I am an active member of the global inclusion council in Avnet, so I promote inclusivity culture within my team and the company, and shape inclusivity policies in the company. I am part of the team that created an inclusivity survey to understand what inclusivity means to different people located in different countries. I also participate in International Women’s Day yearly in Singapore. I am proud to say that my own team is diverse in terms of gender mix and cultural/social preferences. Outside Avnet, as far as possible, I consider local law firms or under-represented attorneys to ensure inclusivity plays a role in the representation of Avnet.