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

Most legal teams have spent the past few years dealing with issues related to the fallout from the pandemic, the ongoing war, the geo-political tensions, and the economic pressures. For our team in the Asia-Pacific, there has been an added layer of stress – several months into the pandemic, in August 2020, our bank announced that for strategic (and non-pandemic related) reasons, it would exit all non-European corporate banking activities and, with the exception of Clearing activities, close all its offices in the Asia-Pacific in the coming years.

What could have been seen as an added complexity has been the most precise mandate. With a clear goal in sight, our legal team has been full steam ahead. On top of business-as-usual work, we have been advising the length and breadth of the organisation on novel issues we did not think we would have to report on, such as critical human resource topics, the navigation of unique transactional issues, a different set of regulatory responsibilities, and the end of contracts that we initially helped to put together. In this last act of one of the oldest international banks in Asia, the legal team has proved invaluable in almost every aspect. I joined the bank 12 years ago to pull together and head the legal team in Singapore, and it is a bittersweet privilege to steer the regional legal function as we move towards the end.

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

Legal is already quite well involved in strategic plans for our organisation, so it was not so much about a lasting increase but reinforcement and reminder of the effectiveness and practicality of having Legal involved. One other thing that has always stood us in good stead, which we have drawn on during the past years of the pandemic, is our relationship capital – the legal team has been a steady ship over the years. The relationships and ways of working we built over the years within the organisation have greatly helped the interactions with internal clients when working and managing legal issues remotely.

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 is important. We have excellent lawyers to choose from in the Asia-Pacific region. Many firms have immediate legal requisites, and a firm’s values can tip a client’s choice in their favour. Leaving aside ESG or LGBTQ+ goals (which many firms have these days, and sometimes one might wonder if there is an element of lip service), what works for me is seeing how seniors treat their associates.

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

Lawyers will have to be more familiar with tech – it is no longer enough to get away with a working knowledge of word and outlook – because the world is that way now. Solid knowledge of Compliance issues for your industry should also be part of the repertoire. The fundamentals will remain: the legal knowledge will still have to be top-notch, and the people skills that we are not taught in law school will still need to be at the forefront (without people skills, no matter how good a lawyer you are, you will have a tough time in-house). At some level, automated contracts and AI may start to take over some jobs (we are only looking as far as the next decade; beyond that, it gets a bit murky). However, I believe that internal clients will still seek a natural person to speak to and understand them, and it will still take a real lawyer to lead and manage an internal legal department.