Team size: Seven

Key team members: Elsa Wong (head of legal), Frederick Chan (senior legal manager), He Yan (senior legal manager) and Dora Chan (senior legal manager)

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

The legal department was only set up in November 2022 and has a rather short history. As a highlight, we were instrumental in showcasing the company’s privacy management programme for entry in the Privacy Commissioner’s Privacy-Friendly Awards 2023 and helping it win the Outstanding Gold Award.

Can you sum up the team culture in one sentence?

We serve everyone in the company!

Our team is committed to making legal services available across the organisation in the most user-oriented and friendly manner. To this end, we aim to build systems, enhance governance (through promoting a compliance culture and tailoring appropriate policies and procedures for the organisation) and digitise our services. We are in the process of developing an online legal platform to provide one-stop services, including legal consultation, contract management, intellectual property protection, litigation management, and provision of legal resources including education and training.

How does the in-house legal team contribute to the overall dispute resolution strategy of the organisation?

In the past, our main challenge was a heavy reliance on external lawyers’ advice and assistance for simple debt collection or issue of payment reminder or demand letter, and we had no central management of litigation cases.

With the development of our in-house legal team, we know how to find solutions to these challenges. Legal teams can help assess different strategies and options available to achieve the most cost efficient and effective outcomes; we liaise with external lawyers but now manage the cases ourselves and don’t depend on them so heavily anymore. Lastly, we have introduced an e-legal platform to manage our litigations.