What are the most significant cases or transactions that you have been involved in over the past year?

From last year, to mitigate legal and compliance risk and, in parallel, enhance the efficiency of the overall organisation, I have led a project team to make process improvements as per the Kaizen (improvement) philosophy. Concretely, the first step is to ask any level of employees to share practices including rules or processes to be improved or developed. The second step is to host meetings with management members and less senior employees to prioritise and agree targets, and the third step is to create small project teams from several departments (sales, service, quality, logistics, and finance etc.) and create, improve and streamline rules and processes. The fourth step is to announce or provide training to related employees, and the final step is to reflect and improve if needed. Through these projects, we encourage employees to speak up on any issues that can mitigate legal or compliance risks in their early stages to achieve increased efficiency of our company.

Based on your experience, what is the key to collaborating successfully with business partners?

Curiosity and a sense of ownership. Legal might sometimes be said to be a consultant with a critical attitude, but my approach is the opposite. I try to communicate and identify any troubles early on, not only with management but also with sales reps or service engineers who face customers and use rules and processes in their daily work. When I find anything to be improved, I encourage these to be solved, and if it is a particularly challenging issue, I involve higher teams and take the lead in solving it. Repeating this approach makes legal more trusted in the organisation, and fosters a culture of collaboration.

What is a cause, business-related or otherwise, that you are passionate about, and why?

Thankfully, our products are medical devices and contribute to saving lives. Our employees are all proud of our products, and they have a passion to provide high quality services. Improving the legal, compliance and ethical foundationof the company while improving efficiency enables our employees to do their best as professionals, which contributes to saving more and more lives. Any improvement is challenging at first, but once it starts rolling, it becomes much easier and produces a chain reaction where anyone can start leading improvements.