Team size: Seven

What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

HSBC is a front runner for digital financial products such as tokenised bonds/commodities in Asia. After we had the first series of these transactions in Hong Kong, various initiatives have been made to expand the access to such products to investors in other countries including Japan.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

I regularly spend time explaining to management teams the worst-case scenario legal risks relevant to our business model and ensure informed management decisions on them. That will be a basis on which the management team will come up with a viable plan to address crisis situations that may arise in the future. Key will be close and transparent communication among management members. Also, it should be important to pause, step back and think about what the right thing is to do as an organisation before going into legal technicalities.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

A turning point in my career as a lawyer is the work related to regulatory reform on OTC derivatives around 2013-2014. At that time, I joined an international bank from Japanese law firm as lead counsel for equities and fixed income business of Japan and was expected to lead local implementation of regulatory reforms. At that time, I was not very familiar with derivatives and therefore leading this initiative while picking up on derivatives in general was a very challenging job. Fortunately, I have managed to lead the changes successfully with a lot of help from colleagues, peers from other banks and external counsel and this experience gave me the feeling of confidence to survive difficult situations.

What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?

I ensure that each of our in-house lawyers has a clear responsibility and ownership on the matters and external counsel selection is made based on the consideration on how effectively it helps us discharge our duty including cost control. We expect external counsels to have a clear understanding of our business model, business strategy and risk appetite and provide the advice needed that is flexibly tailored to what we need for a particular matter including the detailedness of the advice. Also, our strong preference is an external counsel who is an enabler to a situation which looks challenging from a legal perspective with a strong problem-solving mindset. Lastly, in the engagement of external law firms, we shifted from the traditional time-charge based billing model to a fixed fee approach.

Looking forward, what trends do you foresee in the legal landscape over the next five to ten years that companies should prepare for?

It is not possible to predict the legal landscape in five or ten years but what I will feel strongly is that technical contract draft or review job (particularly the one using common templates) will be replaced by AI solutions relatively soon. Introduction of AI solutions in the legal documentation work is currently challenging from a cybersecurity and data privacy perspective, but these challenges will be overcome sooner or later given their overwhelming usefulness. Similarly, AI can conduct legal research effectively, replacing the jobs of junior level lawyers. In the wave of these changes, legal function should focus on top of traditional legal considerations, more on general risk management and consultation around organisational decision making, without limiting ourselves within the typical legal remit. Lawyers need to have a strategic approach to accumulate such experiences in their careers.