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

First, thank you so much for allowing me to speak about the work and the legal team of SAP Japan. This is a team of creative work and great collaboration; I am so proud to talk about them.

Our Japanese legal team is relatively small when considering the business size of SAP Japan, for which the team provides legal support. We are closely working together within the team, as well as across SAP Japan and even across the overseas regional and global legal teams.

SAP is in the middle of a transformation and is rapidly shifting into a Cloud company, from our previous business model of selling on premise license. This means that the employees of SAP need to shift their mindsets as well – to be more agile, proactive, and efficient – the in-house legal team is no exception to this.

In this regard, one of the key projects we have been working on is visualization and the sharing of work. Being a part of a global legal team representing a world leading info-tech company, our legal team has implemented, for years, a variety of deal support systems, such as deal approval workflow, and contract management systems. Additionally, we recently started using shared inbox systems across the Asia-Pacific region which helps not only Japanese legal team but all our legal teams across the region. It allows us to have more visibility on what is going on in which country, based on this we can assist one another’s workload across the region.

As the local legal team, we provide a significant amount of legal support to our business partners. Recently, the number and complexity of inquiries from our customers regarding privacy-related matters is increasing. We also see new regulations being implemented by the government that relate to cloud business, so keeping up with these is vital and submitting the required applications when necessary is becoming one of our priorities.

I want to emphasize that, every one of us matters in this team, we each bring knowledge, experience and open communication. Fearless and candid communication is strongly encouraged at any time, and I believe that the trust established within this team is the most important strength that has made us successful.

Could you share an example of a time when your team came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

Until recently, only a few companies in Japan were using electronic signatures. They preferred to physically store contracts signed in ink. This has changed with the outbreak of the pandemic, which has led to an increased awareness of the importance of electronic signatures. We saw this as the perfect time to share the benefits and implement electronic signatures with our customers and focused our efforts on promoting electronic signatures. As a result, we have been able to reduce the number of paper contracts and become more efficient.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values?

It is critically important; we are a tech company, and we place great importance on speed and efficiency. These are all important factors when choosing external lawyers to work with.

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

Building mutual trust is key, in-house lawyers must communicate a lot with their partners and understand their needs by asking the right questions. Business partners must also communicate what and how the legal team can support them. In-house lawyers must provide reassurance and work together as one team. All these small efforts will add up to a prosperous long-term relationship between the two parties.