About

Gammon Construction is a Hong Kong based international construction company with operations all across Southeast Asia and beyond. Ashley Howlett, director, general counsel and company secretary leads the legal team of four lawyers and seven non-lawyers. The department encompasses legal, insurance and company secretarial functions. The senior legal counsel is mainly focused on corporate and compliance matters, while the legal counsel is generally responsible for litigation matters with paralegals assisting both. Howlett oversees all matters and takes particular responsibility for large disputes or projects and providing advice to the CEO and board. He was appointed three years ago as the company’s first general counsel and inherited a small legal department that had been in place for around 20 years. The company has grown significantly in that time and is now a US$3bn business, which provides dedicated and responsive legal support for the various divisions of the company throughout Asia. Aside from restructuring the department, particular developments in the legal department are the institution of flexi-working, the appointment of an innovation lawyer to look at ways in which innovations in the delivery of legal services can be used by the department, and a move towards paperless meetings. Howlett identifies that the team’s vision is, ‘to be a trusted adviser, recognized as business focused and transparent, driving improved decision-making and efficient execution of business strategy. This is developed by focusing on our five core values of intelligence, flexibility, business sense, integrity and reliability, in order to add value to the business by striving to be a client-focused legal team and not a black box’.