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

Real estate is an asset class that traditionally needs physical inspection and that has been physically impossible during the pandemic. Nevertheless, we have successfully completed transactions implementing the investment strategies of our funds in Japan, China, and Australia. This year we launched our pan-regional Asia Pacific value-add rental housing strategy. We are close to hitting our US1bn target for that strategy and have received equity commitments from institutional investors from Asia, North America, Europe, and the Middle East.

Did the pandemic lead to a lasting increase in the interaction your legal team has with the strategic plans of the company?

Being the relatively newer business in the company, one can’t help but feel the physical distance from the US headquarters or even with other countries within APAC. However, with WFH and no travel being the norm, we found ourselves in a level playing field in terms of face time and level of interaction with international colleagues and senior management. We no longer had to be updated separately on matters that they could have otherwise caught up on informally in person. Periodic virtual meetings and catch ups became the norm and we don’t see this going away even as we start going back to the office. The legal team is better integrated in strategic planning for future funds, pipeline of deals and overall implementation of other initiatives.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this?

It would be appreciated to have a good friendly relationship with external lawyers. Certainly, the quality of legal advice will remain the top consideration but with several equally qualified options, there is something to be said about being easy to work with. There are more than sufficient external factors that can add stress to a closing, external counsel supposed to be working on your side should be the least of it. Particularly for leaner in-house legal teams, external counsel become an unofficial extension of the team, so rapport is important. The same criteria when choosing a member of your own team indirectly apply, including aligned values.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most? Which have you found most useful in your legal team?

The cloud has been the single biggest technological advancement that impacted our legal team in terms of file sharing and being able to work remotely. In the future, I look forward to a tool that can collate and cross reference precedent provisions in various transactional documents across the organisation and with different counterparties. That is currently a very manual process and will only get more difficult as the organisation grows.