Team size: 7

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

The legal department has been a key enabler in establishing a global franchise expansion model to ensure our business can execute its strategic goals. The model is built on a comprehensive legal framework but with a strong practical business angle, enabling business stakeholders to efficiently engage with the framework and empowering them to take ownership of different parts of the framework. The model has already been rolled out successfully into several markets across the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

What would you say are the unique qualities required to be successful as an in-house lawyer in your industry?

As a lawyer in a very business-focused environment where regulatory considerations do not take the front seat, your business acumen and understanding of commercial considerations and triggers are everything. This understanding is also what will allow you to step outside the role of simply being an adviser (in the classic sense of the term) and become a legal business partner to your stakeholders. A good business partner ventures outside the classic legal guidance and mixes it with commercial, operational and strategic business considerations; and a good business partner dares to lean in when the decisions are being made — even when they are not strictly legal (which they rarely are in a retail business). That is what is needed to successfully become not just an in-house lawyer, but a trusted adviser to your stakeholders. Finally, ensure you are a genuinely good team player, and strive to be a cultural ambassador, always meeting your colleagues with kindness.

How have you fostered a closer collaboration between the legal department and your business counterparts?

As part of practicing legal business partnering, delivering valuable and timely legal advice is always key, but ensuring that advice is also commercially and strategically viable and angled is what takes the partnering to the next level. Highlighting how legal can support business project and decisions, enable your stakeholders to carry out the business’ strategic goals and ensure your stakeholder can meet their KPIs are a big part of fostering good relationships. It is about making your stakeholders shine and ensuring they become repeat customers in the legal team.

Do you have a cause, business-related or otherwise, that you are passionate about?

It is a cardinal matter for me that everyone in my team finds purpose and meaningfulness in what we do working for Flying Tiger Copenhagen. How and why work carries meaning will differ from person to person, depending on their trajectory in life which will also change over time. That conversation is imperative for me to ensure that my team is thriving mentally, first and foremost, and thereby able to perform individually and for the business and that we continue to cultivate a high level of trust.