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

Our main focus for this year is on Mergers & Acquisitions, including Joint Businesses and Partnership Collaborations with other airlines. One that falls under this category is the sale of one of our airline subsidiary, MASWings, to the Sarawak Government. This exercise has been widely reported in the press, including its progress to-date. The work is almost at the tail-end as the cut-off date is 31 December 2025. The challenge for legal is to ensure that there is no operational disruptions on Day 1 post-transition. There are two more acquisition works in the process which I am unable to elaborate due to confidentiality. Internally, we are also busy with setting-up our own subsidiary (ie an inhouse kitchen) to manage supply of airline meals to our passengers.

The next major exercise is negotiations on Aircraft Leasing and Financing contracts for A330 and B737 fleet of aircraft. At the same time, we are also facilitating the tender process for purchase of wide-body aircraft to replace the older generations fleet.

Our legal advisory work this year centres around the impact to our commercial contracts following the imposition of new tariff rates by the US, and the on-going sanctions especially by the EU. For this, the legal counsels are expected to be creative in finding solutions on how to mitigate the financial exposure, whilst being in compliant with the laws and regulations.

We also expecting an increase in passenger complaints cases moving forward following the merger of MAVCOM into CAAM, as passengers would tentatively be inclined to bring their complaints to courts if there is lack of expedient resolution by CAAM.

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

Since the twin-tragedies back in 2014, the group chiefs (including in-house counsel) have constantly been trained to ensure that the organisation is crisis-ready, and more importantly there is no impact operationally to our services. When a crisis is triggered, each department must ensure that there is a team to handle the crisis and a separate team to ensure business continuity for the legal department. Counsel who are assigned to manage the operational crisis are already prepared with a checklist guideline on what actions need to be taken, including the person or agency to consult with.

Also back in 2021 when the group was facing financial crisis due to the pandemic, the legal department was proactive in convincing the group to implement the corporate rescue mechanism to ensure the group’s survivability. To this end, a general counsel must have the courage to push the agenda forward, with compelling grounds to syndicate the corporate move.

The current crisis, however, revolves around supply-chain issues – these have more of an operational impact than a financial one. Legal resolution (ie litigation) was not selected as the primary focus as it will lead to an unfeasible outcome operationally when there is already shortage of resources world-wide, instead the group choses on building closer relationships with the suppliers to attain the desired results. Although not at the forefront, Legal was there to guide the business units in every conversations made with the suppliers.

Given these experiences, I believe the team is crisis-ready to face the challenges ahead.

What do you think are the most important attributes for a modern in-house counsel to possess?

Our key strategy for this year is Client Collaboration. I think maintaining good relationships with internal stakeholders is a key success factor as more often than not counsels are expected to resolve conflicts, so by having deep understanding and conversation on the issues at hand and the expectations of the outcome, counsels will be able to resolve any issues effectively.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?

Based on my experience, having an automated contracting process and dispute resolution cases really helps in not just managing the team but also managing the legal exposures of the entire organisation. We are now venturing into chatbot-counsel as the next level, so I would like to advocate that automated process is a must for every inhouse department as I still see general counsels struggling with physical contracts and running around to obtain signatures internally, when the time should be used to focus on resolving actual legal issues.