Team Size: Eight

What are some of the key matters that your legal team has been involved in recently?

Our legal team has been involved in several recent projects; we were involved in Series D financing in June 2022. Our legal team was also involved in responding to trademark infringement lawsuits filed against the company and its subsidiaries in the US. We have also been involved in public affairs activities for the Ministry of Justice’s response to the grey zone elimination system made in June 2022.

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? 

Our legal team has been involved with several innovations that have improved the efficiency of our department and workload. We have improved weekly time charge and billing reports for US litigators. Our previous model required agents to submit weekly time-charge reports in addition to monthly invoices. The weekly reports and invoices were time-consuming for the local representatives and time-consuming for us to check. To improve this a spreadsheet was created to automatically reflect the contents of the weekly reports within the monthly invoices. This has significantly reduced the cost of checking legal fees and streamlined the process.

A second problem that we faced was the visualisation of legal operation status. It was difficult to see how much time was spent in the legal department responding to requests from other departments. To improve this, we linked the application to Slack with which we are automatically collecting data such as the date and time of the question submission, and the date and time of the response and the respondent. It is now possible to visualise how much time each person spends answering questions from other departments. Based on this data, KPIs for the current year can be set, as we achieve these targets, we can visualise our department’s progress.

Another issue that we faced was the efficiency of task management. Due to the high number of requests for legal services we were finding it difficult to manage the tasks of the legal department as a whole. Our team in turn implemented a new application, Trello, which has improved case management efficiency, as any member of the legal team can now create tasks for requests that come to legal. Enquiries via Slack are automatically linked, so tasks are created automatically and anyone can check due dates.

Another important innovation our team deployed was transforming the registration application process. Previously, all applications for registration with our company were outsourced to an external judicial clerk, however this process was time-consuming, and the outsourcing was costly. To resolve this, our legal team created some simple applications for registration in-house, which led to reduced cost costs, while applications could be made in the company’s time.

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

Currently, at the initial selection stage, we do not communicate our values to see if they are understood by potential external lawyers. For example, our values include, “we delight customers”, “we take ownership” and “we build trust”. These are ideas that should naturally be valued when working as a member of society, so we cannot do business with you if we have any doubts that your values do not align during the initial interview. If we have any doubts about these values at our first meeting, we will not be able to do business with you. Also, if events occur during our partnership that are not in line with our values, we may decide that we cannot have a continue or have long-term relationship with you.

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

In order to build strong relationships between in-house lawyers and business partners, it is important for parties to respect one another, to communicate appropriately on an equal footing, and to understand the circumstances of both parties.