Team size: five

As we enter the next decade, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

I feel a multi-disciplinary skill set is hard to find and can be extremely useful in an in-house setting. We usually have domain experts in HR, IT, Legal, engineering, and IP teams. Cross-functional expertise can better help identification of risks and communication with stakeholders. For instance, we have lawyers with engineering degrees and their understanding when working with IP teams on chemical composition joint developments is par excellence.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

I was learning about recent legal developments at a premier law firm in Singapore. The discussion was around how “best efforts” are different from “reasonable efforts” and how the courts have opined on that. This kind of discourse is, of course, miles apart from the type of discussions in company meeting rooms, and our role is to converge the two. In my experience, our business partners work in a very fast-paced, technology-driven, competitive environment. For us to partner with them, our inputs must work on a “less is more” format. I typically like to think of three things likely to go wrong in a transaction or project by sharing case law, expert opinion or past experiences at the outset and then discussing the need to address that through contract negotiations.