Team size: Three

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

Although our day-to-day tasks pose certain challenges and complexities, the most challenging project we have now is KPMG International’s regional clustering initiative, whereby the firm has been executing a series of restructurings and mergers all around the globe, ultimately seeking efficiencies and augmented investment across jurisdictions. While the specific details around this initiative are confidential, we have been continuously working on understanding the impact of regulation, tax, corporate matters, finance, amongst others around the various jurisdictions. Naturally, such implies very careful coordination between member firms and top tier structuring work to ensure compliance and viability for all countries.

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

My view of the in-house legal function is that it should know how the company conducts business and what is key to generating revenue and adapt its response times and risk tolerance based on what it is best for the company for the future. Sometimes legal departments are referred to as the “no” department, basically implying that in-house lawyers would rather say no to almost anything before analysing and weighing risk on a decision, which could result in them being bypassed or ignored, therefore creating more risk along the way. Hence, I would always work with the business to ensure that we are doing what is necessary to ensure the company’s continuity but always setting clear boundaries where the level of risk is not an option for the organisation.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?

I would say that, besides AI, data privacy and tax are taking a center stage in the way we conduct business and legally structure any transaction. For data privacy it is no longer sufficient to have clauses in a contract stating obligations or providing relief; now companies must have internal policies and data treatment procedures that would comply with foreign laws (e.g., GDPR) to be able to contract with clients in certain jurisdictions. As for tax, I believe in-house lawyers can no longer be absentees on how their companies are protecting their own interests vis-à-vis tax costs, especially when doing cross-border transactions, as lack of clarity in withholding taxes and who bears what in a transaction may be cause for disputes in the future.

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?

We tend to recur to external legal services, mainly, in two (2) scenarios: 1) when there is a particular task that involves the deployment of a substantial amount resources that, if done internally, would strain our ability to attend day-to-day activities; and, 2) if a particular matter is of high-enough complexity or is a very specialised area of the law, whereby having a second opinion on hand would be advisable.

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?

As a firm that provides services in audit, advisory, tax and legal, we need to have a fast, clear and business-oriented approach to contracting. Accordingly, our team has been focused on training managers, directors and partners in contracting processes, most common requests from clients and the thought process that generally goes into making a decision around contracting, as we believe that if the primary point of contact is able to handle the simplest tasks of such, we will achieve a great level of efficiency. From such initiative, we have experienced a decline in consultations that refer to common topics for which we have standardised solutions and clients that better understand the reasoning behind our policies or standard terms before legal is involved in the conversation.