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

As a global travel tech company, the legal function must mirror the agility of the business, especially in today’s fragmented and rapidly evolving global travel market. We focus on three pillars.

Risk appetite calibration for speed: We work closely with our management and commercial teams to calibrate our risk tolerance across different markets. For example, our risk appetite for mature markets like Europe would be different from a nascent high-growth market in Southeast Asia. This close partnership enables clarity and agility, which in turn empowers the business to move fast where it matters.

Proactive geopolitical management: We actively monitor global geopolitical movement as well as legislative and enforcement trends, in particular around data privacy, consumer protection and digital marketplace regulations, such as the EU’s Digital Services Act or Southeast Asia’s various e-commerce laws. By anticipating changes, we help the business pivot product roadmaps before compliance becomes a larger issue.

Tech and automation: In order to support a hyper-growth business, we focus heavily on legal ops and automation to scale our impact. We put in place self-service legal tools to automate standardised contracts such as merchant onboarding agreements, vendor NDAs, and marketing partnerships. This empowers our business teams to close commercial deals quickly and directly accelerates revenue. We also take a data-driven approach to optimise resource usage so resources are deployed where they matter most.

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

The role of the General Counsel has undergone a fundamental shift. Historically, the GC was viewed as a reactive corporate shield whose primary job was to minimise risk and manage litigation. Today, the modern GC is a strategic business architect and enabler. At Klook, I do not just look at a business proposal from a legal or regulatory permissibility angle but also consider how we can structure it to maximise commercial velocity while building long-term resilience.

Today’s GCs can create the most value in the following areas.

Strategic Corporate Architecture: Helping the business to structure complex cross-border businesses and regulatory frameworks as a competitive advantage.

Translating Complexity into Strategy: Distilling complex global regulations, such as shifting AI governance or cross-border payment laws, into clear, actionable business recommendations for commercial clarity.

Enterprise Resilience: Looking beyond legal risks to reputational, ethical, and geopolitical risks to ensure the brand remains trusted by millions of customers globally.

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

As a travel-tech leader, the legal team must mirror the tech-savviness of the broader business. At Klook, our engineering and product teams are leveraging agentic AI to build incredible features for travellers, such as our AI-powered discovery tools and localised content translations.

Within our team, our approach to AI is two-pronged.

Internal Efficiency: We use AI tools to scale up our legal operations and automation. The global nature of our business means dealing with different legal jurisdictions and languages. We leverage AI tools for multilingual contract reviews, institutional knowledge management, and parsing high volumes of regulatory updates from across the regions.

External Governance: The legal function’s role has expanded to establish the legal, security, and ethical guardrails for how the entire company uses AI. Over the past year, we have introduced various AI governance frameworks and policies to address emerging global considerations on algorithmic transparency, copyright, and data privacy. We aim to ensure that our consumer-facing AI features comply with global regulations while maintaining the agility the business needs to innovate.