What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

The role of an in-house team during periods of instability or crisis is extremely important. As trusted counsel, management and the board will look to us not only for legal advice but also for strategic partnership to navigate a difficult phase.

In such situations, my focus is first to identify the right stakeholders whose involvement is necessary to make the right decisions. Equally important is ensuring that internal fact-finding is carried out diligently and accurately, which ultimately supports effective decision-making. Documentation in such circumstances is also critical.

Our role then is to devise an effective legal or defence strategy, keeping all potential scenarios in mind, with a realistic assessment of risks and outcomes and a deep understanding of the underlying legal provisions, defences and exemptions.

I would also take the opportunity to ensure that there is organisational awareness of how the crisis arose and, finally, what steps can be taken to avoid or better manage such a situation in the future.
Overall, delicate situations such as these need to be handled with a calm and calibrated approach, supported by a decisive and effective strategy. The objective is to ensure continuity of business with minimal or no disruption, while creating a strong defence for all relevant stakeholders.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?

I think legal teams are definitely keeping an eye on AI tools that could bring greater efficiency to their day-to-day roles. Not only for research or contracting, AI can also help reduce time spent on manual compilation or tracking of data, such as litigation and licence MIS, or help develop policies and SOPs, as well as invoice tracking, at a much faster pace.
This enables teams to focus on true business collaboration, legal strategy, corporate governance and other important matters.
Further, the impact of AI on the operational aspects of business is also growing, and regulators across jurisdictions are formulating their own policies in this regard, ensuring that the use of AI, including GenAI, is trustworthy, people-centric, easily explainable, free from bias and discrimination, and secure, safe and sustainable. Additionally, given the recent enactment of the DPDPA, we also need to be mindful of aspects relating to the processing of personal data, including whether any AI models or systems are being trained on personal information collected by any vendor or third party providing services to the organisation.
Hence, these are indeed very interesting times for in-house teams

What is a cause, business or otherwise, that you are passionate about? Why is this?

I think legal teams are definitely keeping an eye on AI tools that could bring greater efficiency to their day-to-day roles. Not only for research or contracting, AI can also help reduce time spent on manual compilation or tracking of data, such as litigation and licence MIS, or help develop policies and SOPs, as well as invoice tracking, at a much faster pace.

This enables teams to focus on true business collaboration, legal strategy, corporate governance and other important matters.

Further, the impact of AI on the operational aspects of business is also growing, and regulators across jurisdictions are formulating their own policies in this regard, ensuring that the use of AI, including GenAI, is trustworthy, people-centric, easily explainable, free from bias and discrimination, and secure, safe and sustainable. Additionally, given the recent enactment of the DPDPA, we also need to be mindful of aspects relating to the processing of personal data, including whether any AI models or systems are being trained on personal information collected by any vendor or third party providing services to the organisation.

Hence, these are indeed very interesting times for in-house teams!

How does your team contribute to the overall business strategy of the company? Can you share an example of a recent legal-led initiative that had a significant impact?

We frequently assist the business and other support functions on the overall business strategy of the Company. As a general rule, we act as business enablers, help with effective risk assessment and mitigation strategies, and work with internal teams to find practical solutions.

For example, one of the biggest risks on our platform is the risk of partners disintermediating – that is, exchanging contact details with customers and servicing customers offline or outside the platform, without paying commission to the UC platform. Besides affecting our top line, this also significantly increased partner and customer risk in offline transactions (that is, without the protection of UC), thereby affecting the Company’s reputation in many cases.

The legal team has helped to devise effective strategies to address this issue and significantly reduce the percentage of disintermediation. For instance, we introduced a new clause in the partner contract addressing this aspect, conducted rigorous awareness campaigns on the risks associated with offline servicing, helped both business teams and partners understand the broader challenges of such an approach, and worked to build a more robust system around this issue.