About

Founded in 1884, the Hong Kong Jockey Club is one of the oldest institutions in Hong Kong, providing horse racing, sporting and betting entertainment. The organisation is the largest taxpayer in Hong Kong, as well as the largest community benefactor. As executive director of legal and compliance, Philana Poon leads a team of approximately 40 lawyers and support staff, and has been building a compliance team for the past 12 months. Recently the legal team has dealt with regulatory issues associated with the new racecourse in Conghua China which was opened in August 2018. In the next 12 months, the team will continue to focus on regulatory issues in China, along with their usual key areas such as anti-corruption, anti-money laundering, cybersecurity, data privacy and more. Talking about the strategy of hiring and retaining legal talent in the team, Poon states, ‘it’s very hard to find good talent. Once you do, you need to find time and spend effort to groom the talent and make sure that there is a career path for them in the organisation’. According to Poon, ‘technology such as electronic document retention has greatly improved the accuracy and completeness of our document retention. Other technologies such as Boardpad help us efficiently share board papers and other management papers’.