In an increasingly complex global environment, how are you helping your organisation navigate risk while still supporting growth?

We aim to have the inhouse legal function support our organisation by keeping abreast of the latest regulatory changes, and getting ahead of those changes and familiarising ourselves with it.  We keep in close contact with local counsel on regulatory changes in the key jurisdictions to which we operate.  For example, with the new competition filing regime in Australia, we speak to multiple firms to understand the impact on deal doing and also the extent of information required to prepare for the filing in order to ensure that we will be able to navigate through the new regime smoothly.  Where appropriate we also arrange for law firms to come in to provide training to our commercial teams to educate them of the new requirements.

How has the role of General Counsel evolved in recent years, and where do you see GCs creating the most value today?

I believe there was a time when General Counsels are focused purely on legal and corporate governance issues (e.g., negotiate contracts, arrange board meetings and filings etc).  Over the years, the role of general counsel has expanded to cover business matters, and we see more and more general counsels becoming a business partner to senior management, where the senior management often look to the general counsel to help to solve problems and provide suggestions on business issues.  General counsels have also been used to utilise their presentation skills increasing to help companies present to other stakeholders and project management.

How has AI changed the legal function recently (including in the past year), and how are you approaching it within your team?

We have started trialling the use of AI, but not as extensive as other institutions.  We have inhouse subscription to ChatGPT and Microsoft CoPilot, where we are able to raise queries in a sandbox environment.  The team is encouraged to use CoPilot to search for emails or documents (which has proven to be quite efficient).  We are increasing using ChatGPT to check general legal positions on a wide variety of topics before we look at the issue in detail or consult external counsel, particularly on regulatory changes.  The AI output helps us to conduct preliminary analysis and form our own preliminary view, which we can then take to external counsel to then verify (and this allows us to ask more educated questions of external counsel on the topic when we engage with them).  We have not yet used AI to review or summarise documents, which we are aware some of our peer firms would use.

What regulatory or risk trends are having the greatest impact on your role at present?

We see geopolitical issues and changing Government policies (and the related regulatory changes that come with such change in policies) having the biggest impact in recent years.  It is not a secret that the Trump administration rolls out new policies and laws spontaneously.  For example, the US imposed a new policy against offshore wind that are in construction just before the Christmas holidays in 2025, which resulted in extensive analysis on the impact on our portfolio companies (and where one particular company was impacted, it resulted in emergency court injunction processes which is still ongoing) over the holiday period.  Another example is the reverse CIFUS regime promulgated in the US, which could have wide implications on how data centres operate even in APAC (and questions around how data centre operators treat their customers, particularly those from China), which required extensive discussion with external counsel to understand the implications of the laws as well as any potential further rule changes that may follow.  Given the frequent change in stance from the US Government, it is often hard to do any crystal-ball gazing on what could happen next.