What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

The integration of Philippine, US, Singaporean, and China Entities: as an international organisation, Kumu has entrusted our team to facilitate and execute the complex documentation required to seamlessly integrate operations and mitigate legal risks between and among Kumu entities in the Philippines, United States of America (USA), Singapore and China.

This includes the incorporation of a wholly owned company as well as a domestic subsidiary in China, and the subsequent transfer and acquisition of labour and equipment from the previous service provider to the new Chinese entities. Our legal team also updated existing and executed new master service agreements and license agreements among Kumu entities, and termination and assignment agreements for purposes of transferring all operations from the former USA operating company to the Singapore operating company. The transfer of 100% of the shares in the Philippine entity was also affected between the previous individual shareholders to the Singapore operating company.

Another key initiative was our work on Legal Knowledge Sharing Tools and a Document Management Project. With a team as young as ours, only having been organized sometime March 2021, some of the issues confronted by a newly-established legal team working remotely are ensuring that its members have easy access to up-to-date information and records, and future-proofing its operations to enable a seamless transfer of knowledge from current members to future members. This is even more challenging in a start-up environment where the legal team is expected to work effectively while managing limited resources.

Given this, our team leveraged an existing program being used by the organisation to create a centralized hub for storing, sharing, and searching documents and information, and monitoring progress of major projects and compliance requirements of the various entities they are managing. With this system, important and updated information could be found much faster, and documents could be shared more efficiently within and outside the team. This is also a step towards futureproofing the team’s operations, as members of the legal team can benefit from shared knowledge that can be passed on to its future members.

In addition, and as part of our team’s knowledge sharing efforts, a legal bulletin project was launched to keep the company informed of legal developments that may have an impact on its business, future projects, or its employees. The project also serves as a means by which our Team shares practical legal knowledge with members of the organisation, such as tips on understanding basic terms of contracts they deal with regularly. Through this project, our Team can guide the business decisions of the leaders of the organisation.

We also worked on an Update of the Terms of Use and Registration with the US Copyright Office to Protect Online Intellectual Property Rights. For this, our Team recognised the business of Kumu to provide a platform where users can freely share content in real time via livestream. However, our department also recognised its responsibility of protecting the intellectual property rights of content creators. For this purpose, we worked with internal business units of the company and foreign counsels to establish a system that will enable content creators to immediately report suspected cases of infringement and how the company can immediately take down these infringing materials. Our Team documented these steps in the updated Terms of Use of Kumu.

Furthermore, our team also registered the company with the US Copyright Office as copyright agent who can receive infringement and takedown notices from content creators in the USA.

We also updated the Kumu App’s Community Guidelines (known as Kuminity Guidelines) to further educate Kumu Users on the importance of respecting intellectual property rights of content creators. Since most of the Kumu users are Filipinos, our Team provided a Filipino translation of the Kumunity Guidelines.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

Our team is well aware of the existing stereotypes that ordinary in-house legal teams may be known for and made sure that we blend our practices with the culture of Kumu, as an organisation. Instead of appearing to be know-it-alls with a “know what’s best attitude”’ we decided to hear out what other business units had to say. We solved legal issues alongside – not for – our stakeholders, and this collaborative approach further endeared our Team to the rest of our organisation.

This is not to say that we had to throw the law out of the window. Far from this, we’ve managed to resolve long-standing or recurring key legal issues with potentially adverse business implications, because our stakeholders are now willing to hear us out as well. A better and more open communication was, and still is, the key to our transformation.

What spelled the difference in our team is how each of us acted less of a textbook adviser and more of a business partner, crafting each legal advice with business opportunities in mind. Our days became filled with discussions on not just what the law is, but also on how the law could make things happen for our organisation. We were no longer just problem identifiers; we became problem solvers. This helped enable our stakeholders to take calculated business risks that could not have been considered otherwise.

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?

People tend to associate innovation with the use of new technologies or introduction of groundbreaking processes. Our team did not afford such luxuries. We approached innovation the same way American Entertainment Business mogul, Tom Freston, did – ‘taking two things that exist and putting them together in a new way.’ Indeed, we went through a metamorphosis to get to where we are right now. We were able to do this by creating a centralised hub for storing, sharing, and searching documents and information, and monitoring progress of major projects and compliance requirements of the various entities they are managing. This enabled us to future-proof our operations through a seamless transfer of knowledge from current members to future members.

We also managed to keep things fun. Some in-house teams dream of work-life balance. We at Kumu live it, as part of the corporate culture. Despite the pandemic and remote working arrangements, we made time to travel together this year. We joke around, make fun of ourselves, and connect with each other outside of work. These are things that most teams may have forgotten about under the “new normal,” but which our team realised are very important to keep the stress out of our systems. Magical things do happen when you’re enjoying your work, and our Team has proven just that, with our stakeholders’ satisfaction as evidence.