Team size: 20

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

Constant change is integral to a tech company. As part of Lazada’s constant innovation, the legal team supported a multi-year strategy shift in the commercial strategy, which involved rethinking how products, product reviews, recommendations and sales channels were presented on the platform. A couple of years ago, we also trialed a new “Choice” product funnel, which integrates supply chain and store management into the existing e-commerce platform offering. This required the team to have broader expertise of the entire lifecycle of a product on our platform, including sourcing, promotion, sale and logistics.

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

When things are in flux, it is important to be very clear about what remain the priorities and what are distractions. It is especially important that I, as well as the senior leaders in my team, help the management and other decision-makers to identify what the core issues are through the noise of uncertainty. Constant communication within the team helps the members to process what they are seeing and feeling about what’s going on in the organisation, and also to bring focus back to their core duties.

We are currently living through a time of geopolitical change, and the world order that we have come to take for granted for many years is being rewritten. Does this affect your company’s risk profile and, if so, what are you doing to mitigate this?

While Lazada, being in Southeast Asia, is not directly in the line of fire between the West and China, we are seeing increased impact of the geopolitical tension on our business decisions. As Lazada is part of the Alibaba Group, we are extremely mindful of how our actions may be perceived as actions of our parent group, and by extension, of a “Chinese business”. Particularly when we deal with government agencies and regulators in our region, we have recently included in our decision-making an assessment of how our actions may be perceived by the local governments and the public. We also now engage more closely with our government affairs team to jointly assess the potential impact of all major decisions.

What is a cause, business or otherwise, that you are passionate about? Why is this?

I am a loud advocate of better legal operations and technology in the legal team’s work. To me, the continuity and strength of a legal team do not solely rely on the team’s ability to recruit and retain well. The team needs to be able to build on the organisation’s knowledge and lessons learned, and be able to transform these into tools that can preserve the team’s efficiency and continuity – even during periods of instability in the workforce or work capacity. My focus on legal operations is not just adopting or developing shiny new tools. Instead, I have dedicated resources at both Lazada and Alibaba International level to examine how the team is working, identify where we are spending more time or effort than ought to be required on a task, execute (big or small) improvements to processes and tools to improve those inefficiencies, and to leverage latest technology to develop new tools to guide decision-making and daily operations.