About

Carl Watson, general counsel of Arcadis Asia and part of its Asia leadership team, heads the legal department which contains seven lawyers within the region, including three lawyers and one team coordinator located in Hong Kong and Macau. The team also welcomed new members in Manila in the past 12 months. Like many global professional services consultancies, Arcadis is embracing new technology to constantly challenge how it delivers the best solutions to clients, particularly around the development of smart cities. ‘The legal team is enabling this evolution through revisions to policies and supporting awareness of legal risks in new ways of working and the digital environment including data privacy assurance, cyber threats and more. We have seen data privacy across our global and regional businesses as a real focus point for us over the past 12 months’, highlights Watson. The team sees digital disruption driving further challenges for their operations in an increasingly competitive Asian market, ‘but we are confident in the investment we are making to drive performance’, says Watson adding, ‘there is likely to be more political stability in the next 12 months across core markets and we look to step up our services into infrastructure advisory and design and engineering in particular – we are driving legal support to the business in these areas’. In terms of hiring and retaining talent in the team, the legal department will build on the agile resourcing model they have in place. ‘An area of focus for this year is to explore billability for the legal team and look to deploy our lawyers on to client projects for example, provide contract and legal training modules for client team, advising on tender or submission development. We are looking at legal resources in various locations to drive cost efficiencies, such as Malaysia and the Philippines’, Watson explains. The team has adopted various technology platforms including automated training modules for the business, digitalised governance processes, as well as document and claims management platforms for reporting to the global headquarters. According to Watson, an area that the team is developing deeper this year is dashboarding and identifying trends in terms of both legal team utilisation and external legal spend through the use of Power BI tools. ‘As the executive responsible for legal and compliance, I am then able to update my leadership colleagues on what the team is working on to enable them to understand the overhead cost build up and guide on prioritisation and efficiencies’, he says.