Team size: 28
Key team members: Zack Quek (group general counsel), Siricha Kiatrabil (head, group regulatory compliance), Mirza Imada (head of legal, Indonesia), Claro Ortiz (head of legal Philippines), Doris Liu (head of legal, China), Glenda Cao (head of legal, Vietnam) and Doreen Tan (head of legal, Malaysia)

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

To drive inorganic growth within the Ninja Van Group, Ninja Van Legal completed three acquisitions of software companies in China, Austria, and Vietnam. These acquisitions involved complex intellectual property laws across different jurisdictions and detailed due diligence for early-stage software firms with less organised data and finances. After the acquisitions, Ninja Van legal reorganised and heightened the corporate governance and risk management standards, enabling each unit rapid expansion across multiple countries.

Ninja Van Legal oversaw a $500+ million Series E investment led by Alibaba Group and DPD Group into Ninja Van. This involved extensive due diligence across the seven countries where Ninja Van operates. Legal successfully resolved investor inquiries and negotiated definitive documents, ensuring the necessary alignment between new investors, existing shareholders, and Ninja Van Founders and management for the successful completion of this round.

Ninja Van legal also managed and closed a multi-country, multi-services agreement with a leading global social media application venturing into the Southeast Asian e-commerce space. This matter was accomplished in a matter of weeks, resulting in a substantial boost in Ninja Van Group’s overall revenue within a short period.

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

Ninja Van Legal takes great pride in consistently achieving a two-day turnaround time for almost all legal matters. To enable department heads to efficiently manage and monitor caseloads and to effectively communicate the high level of legal services to business units, Ninja Van Legal has successfully implemented an in-house digital legal services ticketing system.

This system allows team leaders to instantly assess the workload of each team member, make case assignments accordingly, and closely monitor the progress and handling of each case. Additionally, it provides transparency to the business units, enabling them to gauge the efficiency with which their legal requests have been handled. The collection of legal operational data empowers the general counsel to plan staffing levels and strategically focus the legal department’s efforts on gaining expertise in burgeoning legal areas with a high level of accuracy.

Can you sum up the team culture or ethos?

All members of Ninja Van’s legal team serve as decision-makers for legal and regulatory risks, overseeing their management and mitigation across the Ninja Van Group.

Apart from legal matters, has the team worked on other company initiatives?

The Ninja Van legal team consistently demonstrates a strong sense of ownership and accountability for the company’s outcomes. In Indonesia, the legal team is piloting a Triple-O (Ownership of Outcomes) training program designed for all senior and mid-level managers within Ninja Van. This training program aims to instil in managers a heightened sense of responsibility regarding the potential impact of their actions and omissions on the entire Ninja Van Group.

Furthermore, the program seeks to foster a culture where managers feel encouraged to proactively address and resolve issues, including business and other risks, even if they fall outside the area of their specific functions. This approach ensures that the company consistently makes and executes well-considered 360-degree decisions.

Does your team make use of interesting tech solutions to streamline its workload?

Our in-house AI digital solution now enables the verification of customer identities, capable of identifying and rejecting invalid identification documents while extracting necessary details for our customer onboarding process. This advancement has significantly improved the speed of our KYC procedures, making it nearly instantaneous and allowing us to reject customers associated with poor payment histories.