Team Size: 56

Can you briefly explain how the legal team is structured, highlighting key individuals and their role within the department?

The LTA Legal team are at the forefront of emerging technologies and novel regulatory approaches in the transportation sector. In preparing legislation, statutory licenses, and other legal instruments in these areas, we keep abreast of evolving policy and continually think ahead to future-proof all that we do. We have taken aboard signal lessons of the pandemic to leverage the digitally connected age for our organisation’s business continuity.

LTA legal comprises six divisions. These are corporate and public transport, headed by Karen Mok, prosecution – paths, streets, and services, led by Hoi Min Fah, prosecution – roads, directed by Nicholas Gerald Neubronner, public transport, led by Kelvina Lim, and two vehicles teams, regulations and licensing, and services and infrastructure, both headed by Dilip Vasu Theavan.

As we enter the next decade, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

Corporate legal teams must be prepared to embrace and harness the transformative potential of technology. As technologies, such as natural language processing and machine learning, advance in their ability to perform traditional tasks of in-house counsel, we expect that data literacy will be increasingly vital for us to interface with those modern technologies and continue to support our organisation. To be ready for this transformation, members of our legal team will have to learn to collaborate effectively across various disciplines and develop capabilities in systems thinking, so that we can evolve the way we work and enhance our work. In this regard, all members of the LTA legal team are actively encouraged to take courses in data literacy, systems thinking and digitalisation, with funding opportunities for more in-depth learning. Of course, our relationships with our colleagues will continue to lie at the heart of our work.

The unusual business environment created by the pandemic has been swiftly followed by other shocks. Are you now putting more emphasis on preparing for the unforeseen and, if so, what does this entail?

To maintain our preparedness for unforeseen disruptions, we are preserving our flexible and remote working capabilities that were hard won at the height of the pandemic, by allowing members of the legal team to work from home up to two days a week. We remain vigilant against backsliding towards the complacency and inefficiencies of pre-pandemic work practices. Substantively, we are devoting more attention to our business continuity plans, and review contracts to ensure resilience and other contingency provisions in the legal instruments we work on.