Team size: 3

What has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year?

The economic situation has impacted everyone, all over the world. Where this has been true for the consumer goods industry and our customers, debt collection has become an important challenge for us over the past year. Trying to be efficient in this area of the law is extremely difficult. We have had to find ways to be creative and use our negotiation skills, which is not only challenging in the litigation area but also in trying to obtain guarantees and secure assets to cover the aforementioned debts. To this end, we have managed to have a good collection success rate within the larger debts. The tax-related advice, projects, and litigation we have engaged in in the last year have also been challenging taking into consideration the amount of audits, assessments, and litigation we have seen.

In which ways have you attempted to bring the legal department closer to your business colleagues?

Our legal department participates in goal alignments, regular staff meetings, and joins up with our business colleagues once a month to learn about department needs, projects and other activities we might be able to help them with, such as attending events they are sponsoring. We also try to verse ourselves in the subject matter that is relevant to them so we can speak the same language across business and legal affairs. For example, the legal department has learned everything there is to know about e-commerce, data privacy, how to handle influencers, managing first party data, and other digital business concerns in an effort to streamline work with our business colleagues.

What are some of the most significant cases and transactions you have been involved in recently?

We were able to recover over $2m in outstanding debts, including $1.5m recovered in a litigation against an insurance company that refused to pay a guarantee they’d issued to cover the debt of a customer. Additionally, we were able to close a $72m alleged patent infringement case we had battled for over 8 years. In the digital arena, we were able to finalise our digital legal archive and several operations systems that were developed by us internally.