About

French multinational L’Oreal has a well-established presence in the Asia market having a wide range of products available to consumers across the region. Asia general counsel Susin Chiam has lead the legal team at L’Oreal since the start of 2018, bringing with her extensive experience of management of in-house legal teams including at Pepsi Co, Gategroup and Diageo. Regarding Chiam and her leadership of the team, one nominator said the following: ‘Chiam has just been with L’Oreal for half a year, however she has done a lot with the big French organisation [in that time] already’. Chiam and her team of more than 30 lawyers, created internal communication channel and organised an Asia Pacific legal team gathering whilst also working on an internal magazine for the in-house lawyers within Asia and at company headquarters in France, all of which give her team a greater sense of belonging to the organisation. The team has also innovated a contract template utilisation system, training business people to use the IT system to make non-disclosure and master agreements themselves, to save the team’s time to use on more complicated legal issues. The team has also used a new IT system to monitor counter sales on small behaviours to better protect consumer’s interest, on a few small but crucial issues, including data-protection matters. A nominator heaped further praise on Chiam, and explains how the team is expanding further in its remit and capabilities, stating ‘she put in a lot effort improving the imperfect practice status and she has a lot more
in her pipeline to do’.