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

In a general sense, my work can be described as providing legal services to facililate shareholder’s business mapping across Asia Pacific, assisting headquarter on projects which has a landing in Asia Pacific.

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

Be Human First. Many foreign companies that were once the greatest in their industry are forced to take tremendous measures to keep their names afloat these years. When decisions are taken to reduce the scale of operations, the first and probably the most significant thing that Legal has to deal with are employment issues, and, with that, comes people’s emotions. Note that emotion not only comes from the employees that are being let go, but also those who are staying. The negative consequences of the latter can become way more severe than management might have imagined; when those who are still on the boat develop frustration and distrust towards the company, there comes deliberate underperformance, which can eventually worsen the situation.

What can Legal do to give your colleagues peace of mind and keep them performing at the same level? Show them you are a human before a lawyer. Communicate honestly and respectfully with all your colleagues, tell them things you are allowed to disclose and try reveal the positive side of this dark moment that might bring to their personal growth. Share with them your vulnerability too (note many generals are abandoned by their King once the wars were won); advise HR and the Management on legal aspects with a strong touch of fairness; defend those who deserves better treatment and fight against those who wants to take advantage of the company. When your remaining colleagues recognise that the Legal department is the wall that they can fall back on, even when the worst scenario one day arrives, you can help the management to hold a functional team together to ride out the storm in the meantime. 

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

My ability to bring people together and communicate effectively had helped me to solve many difficult topics. Legal should not be just a bystander, or like police that only appear when things got ugly. A good legal department should participate in businesses. 

We often hear management say things like “ we are a team” or “we need to trust each other and work together”, but trust doesn’t come out of thin air. For a team to work together, it requires a shared goal, which won’t be realised without honest and effective communication. The fact is, in a so-called “team”, people tend to hide behind their screens these days, trying to avoid the elephant in the room by sending emails with ambiguous and overly friendly words. In order for me to come up with a better legal solution for my colleagues, I often pull all involved departments together and force them to speak on key issues, sometimes with regular meetings to keep each party on the same page. Most of the time, once we share the same end goal, people’s fences lower and they start to share their honest approach. Then it is my job to note down all the concerns from each side, and try to provide a legal solution that benefits each party with lowest exposure of others. In the end, we run towards the finish line together, and it is so rewarding to achieve with the team. 

What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?   

Finding trustworthy external counsel then making them my extended team has been my principle in terms of using external support. 

In principle, I review all legal issues myself and solve them myself, within my capacity frame. I actively involve external counsel when it comes to addressing issues concerning foreign jurisdictions, patents and (potential) dispute and litigation strategy.

I like to test candidates with small issues before entrusting anyone with big projects, as small issues will show a firm’s attentiveness and professionalism. Key elements include seeing how long it takes them to give you an answer each time; carefully reviewing the billings in light of the answers received and seeing if their answer is a simple and on-point solution or somewhat redundant; observing if they can quickly assemble a small team for you each time; and observing the turnover rate in the team they assembled for you and the relationship among leading partners, which will show you the sustainability and reliability of the firm. 

Looking forward, what trends do you foresee in the legal landscape over the next 5–10 years that companies should prepare for? 

Certainly, everyone is thinking about the same thing: will AI replace our work? This is likely to happen, particularly junior level work, as AI will deliver average acceptable results while saving the training costs. But as in-house counsel, or even as a legal community, we should consider at least the following: what is the true value behind our profession?  It is not just putting together laws or cases and then coming up with a conclusion. The variable parts of every case, the deliberation of each scenario require our human side – that’s communication and participation.

And what is our responsibility to the young ones who arrived one or more decade later than us? It would be our joint failure if we failed to train them to a level less than ourselves simply because of the arrival of AI. 

I sincerely hope Legal 500, and this GC Powerlist, can be the union for our legal community, gathering us around the world to realise our value and to foster our future together.