Team size: Ten

Key team members: Lily Chan, Leona Xie, Ellinor Willow and Anna Korsvold

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Daniel Wellington has entered a strategic partnership with American watch manufacturing company Timex Group, and Timex Group will become a distributor of Daniel Wellington’s products in the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Poland and India. In turn, Daniel Wellington will distribute Timex’s various brands in China. The Daniel Wellington legal team, led by Lily Chan, was heavily involved in the agreement preparation, negotiation and implementation of this strategic partnership. Daniel Wellington experienced a major worldwide business restructuring last year to cope with the fast-changing market dynamics across the world, as a result we have deepened our collaboration with our local business partners for distribution and marketing.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

Due to the high volume of online marketing and influencer collaborations, there was a large number of standard contracts which our legal team had to handle and manage manually. To keep up with the speed of the business and to improve the efficiency of the turnaround of the relevant transaction documents, the legal team worked with the in-house IT team to create an online automated contracting system for the creation of the company’s standard contracts. This was effectively a zero-cost project, as all IT technical support came from the in-house IT team and legal team.

Can you sum up the team culture in one sentence?

The legal team is friendly, cheerful and collaborative. We are perceived as trusted business partners who possess the professional legal knowledge to support the business worldwide. Our business teams always involve us, from the initial stages, in any business initiative, and the team is well respected by all internal stakeholders within Daniel Wellington.

Apart from legal matters, has the team worked on other company initiatives?

Yes, the team also supports compliance work across the business, including legal compliance, product compliance, trade compliance, business ethics, code of conduct, and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) matters. We work closely with our people and culture team, and design, products and logistics team on the aforementioned compliance matters.