About

‘Hiro established and is currently building one of the most innovative legal teams in Japan,’ says one bystander. When Hiro Kato joined the international oil and gas company, it had no dedicated legal function or staff. A year later he leads a team of six foreign lawyers, and company policy has been amended to ensure they support all overseas projects, review all major contracts, and handle the appointment and management of all external counsel. ‘I believe our biggest achievements to date have been the successful creation of the legal department from scratch and its seamless incorporation into our corporate infrastructure,’ Kato says. ‘These achievements speak volumes of the foresight of our senior management and the calibre of our in-house personnel’. Building a legal review stage into business operations and with it changing entire corporate-wide behaviour, he admits, has been challenging, but the success is already tangible. ‘I believe the legal department has already become an integral part of INPEX’s daily business operations’. At the centre of this outcome, Kato is clear, lies the people not only in legal but across the wider business. ‘I work with talented, engaging and forward-thinking people,’ he says. ‘This has allowed us to build something exceptional: a fully-integrated transaction-focused legal department with purpose-built systems, processes and tools, all from scratch.’