About

Over the course of her 15 years of employment with the company, Yolande Goh has seen the Equinix legal team that she has led since 2006 grow from four to 18 lawyers in line with the business’s growth. This has been accomplished while maintaining the efficiency and internal resilience of the team, as evidenced by Goh reporting that ‘the turnover rate of the team is much lower than the industry average and the growth of the team are mostly incremental, and not as a result of team members leaving’. Indeed, she counts ‘playing a pivotal role in Equinix’s rapid and meteoric global expansion’ as perhaps her foremost career highlight: ‘In the last 15 years, Equinix has grown from a small data centre provider in the Silicon Valley to the world’s leading global data centre provider which has achieved a remarkable record of 63 consecutive quarters of growth. It has taught me that grit, determination and most importantly, good leadership and great team work are necessary ingredients for the success of an organisation’. When discussing the strategies she has used to grow and equip a top-level in-house legal department, Goh is clear that – alongside legal skill – a painstaking approach towards business knowledge is crucial for the individuals within the team: ‘I am a firm believer that in addition to possessing sound technical expertise, in-house counsels must also acquire a good understanding the business’ products and needs in order to anticipate and proactively manage risks as well as to build a collaborative partnership with the business functions to achieve the organisation’s objectives. As a result, we have won the respect of our internal clients, business counterparts and outside counsel by being willing to generate, consider, coach and implement innovative and practical solutions to complex or difficult legal issues as well as to build good relationships across all hierarchies’. This approach has borne impressive fruit in terms of the team’s transactional success; In 2018 Goh and her team were involved in the 2018 acquisition of Metronode in Australia valued at approximately A$1.035bn and the 2016 acquisition of Bit-isle valued at approximately US$28m.