Team size: 20

Key team members: Lindsey Wiedmann, Jason Espersen), Marc Robinson, Stephane Velat, Su-Lynn Choy, Matt Kasdin

Major legal advisers: In Singapore, White & Case, Morrison & Foerster, Bird & Bird, and Dan Tan Law; In Malaysia, Chee Siah Le Kee & Partners, Navaratnam Chambers, and Shearn Delamore; In Philippines, Puno & Puno and Romulo Mabanta Buenaventura Sayoc & de los Angeles

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

Our team has taken part in major transactions in the past year. We spun off from SunPower Corporation as an independent, NASDAQ-listed company headquartered in Singapore; collaborated with Samsung on smart home energy management solutions; announced plans for a $1bn investment in a new solar cell and panel manufacturing facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We also partnered with Nanyang Technological University for solar recycling and Maxeon Solar Technologies was named one of the world’s top 100 most sustainable companies.

Can you sum up the team culture or ethos?

Our corporate values are Powering Positive Change, We Hold Ourselves to a Higher Standard, and We Thrive Together. These mottos are indicative of who we are. The legal team is extremely focused on the importance of our work to make the world a better place – to Power Positive Change – and we attract and retain talent on that basis.

Holding ourselves to a higher standard is an ethos that begins with our engineers, who have been at the forefront of solar technology for more than a quarter of a century, and percolates through the legal department as we all must answer to internal stakeholders who are world class in what they do.

Finally, we definitely thrive together. Our team is based on four continents with lawyers based in Australia, China, France, Italy, and the US in addition to at our headquarters in Singapore. When we come together for in-person meetings, the team spirit is infectious!

Apart from legal matters, has the team worked on other company initiatives?

Maxeon’s legal team stands out in that it also oversees compliance, ethics and sustainability, which are not standalone functions. In particular, the sustainability function is a stand-out success story, led by our chief legal officer who sits in California, Lindsey Wiedmann, who is also the chief sustainability officer, but managed day-to-day by Matt Kasdin with a small team reporting to him.

Although the company is barely three years old, we are already rated one of the Top 100 Most Sustainable Companies in the world. Our chief financial officer was recently invited to represent Singapore – and all of Asia – in a global forum at the New York Stock Exchange on how companies can use financial tools to promote universal sustainable development goals.

How does the in-house legal team contribute to the overall dispute resolution strategy of the organisation?

Maxeon’s legal team gets involved early and is very active in trying to avoid legal disputes escalating to litigation, and in most cases we are successful. We do this by proactively training our purchasing department on dos and don’ts and having close and regular communication daily, usually on Microsoft Teams.

By being accessible and answering questions early, we do our best to avoid problems later. When disputes do escalate, we do our best to provide practical advice to the business owners in plain language without resorting to too many technical terms.