Team size: Three

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

First, we maintain a robust legal partner ecosystem with specialised law firms in different jurisdictions across Asia where we have the legal entities, which ensures us to reach out to experts within hours for any emergent issues.

Second, our lean legal structure, coupled with the full authorisation delegated by US legal, enables us to decide things efficiently.  

Thirdly, through our handling of multiple issues, the business team, share service team and management have developed a strong confidence in the Asia Legal Team. This has fostered a culture of proactively seeking advice from the legal team, significantly enhancing the accuracy of the crisis response.

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?   

For complex legal matters such as M&A transactions, major asset acquisitions and data privacy compliance and litigations, we’ll engage external lawyers. For contract review and template drafting, if it does not involve particularly specialised legal jurisdictions or fields, it is generally drafted and reviewed by in-house.

The main business of CHR Asia is global forwarding, so most of the claims raised by our customers are claims of cargo damages/losses. We therefore only use the external lawyers who are specialised in the area. When we engage the external lawyers for these claims, we always closely work with them and discuss their strategy of each step, including how to defend and whether to reach a settlement and what settlement would provide maximum protection of our interests. I prefer the lawyers who can stand in our shoes, analyse the pros and cons of whether to reach a settlement, or work out various strategies of defence. If a lawyer impresses me, I will engage them next time when we face similar issues.

When there is a new issue or an issue in a jurisdiction where we don’t have any external lawyers we’ve worked with, I either ask the lawyers I recognise to recommend, or I will check Legal 500 or other recommendation lists, to find two or three candidates. I will talk with them and compare their thoughts on the cases and decide who to engage.

Costs always matter, since we are required to save costs in all aspects. We try to help our stakeholders who undertake legal costs save money. We will negotiate the prices with the external lawyers to a reasonable extent, and we try to be more prepared, with guidance from external lawyers rather than assigning everything to them, to decrease the amount of billing hours.

How does your team contribute to the overall business strategy of the company? Can you share an example of a recent legal-led initiative that had a significant impact?  

During the recent significant organisational restructuring, Asia legal played a pivotal role. We not only participated in strategic planning, but also ensured all workforce transition processes – particularly the most sensitive personnel optimisation – were executed lawfully, smoothly, and systematically to protect the company’s interests. We also effectively mitigated potential risks of labour disputes.

The main works we’ve completed include: conducting legal risk evaluations of proposed restructuring plans, identifying different points under labour regulations in different jurisdiction; educating line managers/HR on negotiation skills to prevent unlawful termination arising from wrong communications; requiring HR to keep all related communications, meeting minutes, notices and acknowledgments to prepare for potential labour claims; advising on whether to enforce non-compete agreements by assessing necessity and compensation; supervising HR on offboarding processes to ensure return of company assets/documents and ongoing confidentiality compliance; and working with external lawyers to figure out the strategy of defence for arbitration/litigation of labour disputes.