About

The legal team at one of Singapore’s top three telecom operators, Starhub Group, embraces a business centric approach to legal management. ‘We provide professional and prompt legal support to facilitate our business’, asserts general counsel and company secretary Veronica Lai. ‘Rather than say “no”, we work collaboratively with our business colleagues, to seek pragmatic and commercial solutions’. In charge of a team of 11 lawyers, four paralegals and six support staff, Lai strives to empower and delegate down to the lowest appropriate level of competency to ensure that her employees are constantly challenged. ‘Every two to three years, we will do a portfolio rotation of work allocated, to ensure that there is sufficient diversity of skills, and “freshness” in work’, Lai elaborates. ‘This enables our lawyers to grow new skill-sets and technical knowledge whilst expanding their network of contacts, which is key to our successful retention of a stable, skilled team’. Having recently strengthened with the addition of two new M&A lawyers, to reflect the expansion of Starhub’s M&A activities over the last two years, the team has showcased extensive transactional pedigree. In a particularly fruitful 2017, the team advised on a number of marquee deals, such as Starhub’s acquisition of 4G spectrum at S$349m, renewal and increase in StarHub’s Medium Term Notes programme to S$2bn and the acquisition of D’Crypt for up to S$122m. Apart from its legal “day job”, the team undertakes extensive corporate social responsibility efforts: ‘We recently served at the Willing Hearts Soup Kitchen as a team, packing meals for the needy’, Lai says. ‘To support StarHub’s sustainability efforts, we have also gone paperless in our documentation, adopting e-filing of executed legal agreements, and automated our contract management system. The Secretariat support for the StarHub’s board of directors has also gone paperless. We implemented a customised Board Portal, and all board meetings are now paperless’.