Team size: Five

Can you sum up the team culture or ethos?

Since our establishment in 1995, we have been a key player in the local automotive industry, especially in the luxury segment. Mercedes Benz’s strategy in leading the technology and iconic luxury cars is based on sustainability, people transformation, cost efficiency and digitalisation. Therefore, the team ethos is not only to give comprehensive legal support to ensure legal compliance in the company’s day-to-day operations but also to act as the second shoulder of the business to develop our chances-oriented, balance attitude towards risk, giving creative, efficient problem-solving and solutions.

The company has been significantly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, supply chain disruption, and semi-conductor shortages. In the second half of 2022, further headwinds of economic downturn especially in real estates and car industries led us to face unprecedented challenges. MBV Legal has constantly been dealing with the high time pressure, uncertainty and new challenging business ideas and plans.

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?

Although Vietnam’s legal framework for the application of e-signatures has been regulated in the Law on Electronic Transactions 2005 (LoET), there are still no foreign e-signature certificate authorities that are officially qualified by the local authority. Furthermore, the use of wet ink signatures, hard-copy documents and the physical company seal has been a long-time practice and is unlikely to change. Therefore, applying e-signatures could lead to legal risk of not being accepted by business partners, competent authorities or the courts when having disputes, litigation, and audits.

When Go Vap district, where MBV is located, was locked down from May 2021, we started to apply e-signature in concluding contracts and internal documents. My team studied applicable regulations, assessed legal risks, and proposed the executive board to apply e-signatures during the pandemic period. We quickly issued instructions for applying e-signatures, sent the notices to our business partners and drafted an agreement on accepting e-signatures to be signed by parties.

After the pandemic was controlled, our team proactively attended many conferences related to LoET to raise questions and ask for further instruction from lawmakers. We have sent several official dispatches asking for opinions from authorities in Ho Chi Minh City on their acceptance of using e-signatures; and raised similar questions via different trade associations.

On the technical side, we internally coordinated with other colleagues to request the headquarters’ support to integrate the local qualified digital certificates in the group’s e-sign platform. To encourage our business partners to use e-signature, the egal team organised several sessions to clarify and respond to their questions.

From July 2022, MBV officially applied e-signatures for all internal documents, approvals of the company and contractual documents with local partners on a voluntary basis. From September 2023, the executive board finally approved e-signature to apply for all transactions between MBV and our business partners, both local and foreign partners.

We have received response letters from HCMC Tax, Customs, and Vietnam Register confirming their support for MBV’s e-signature implementation. We will keep supporting relevant departments in MBV to work with authorities in the future to convince them and get more acceptance of using e-signature and e-document archiving.

Overall, this e-signature implementation brings significant benefits to MBV, creates remote access, improves user convenience, flexibility, avoids time and effort consuming coordination processes, promotes information security, and saves cost efficiently.