About

The Lane Crawford Joyce Group is Asia’s premier fashion retail, brand management and distribution group, operating luxury department stores and boutiques, free-standing branded stores, e-commerce and omnichannel operations. Natalie Da Gama-Rose serves as group general counsel and leads a team of three lawyers, one paralegal and one executive assistant. Commenting on internal changes in the past 12 months, Gama-Rose says, ‘we are replacing roles in the team and using alternate service providers in the interim because of the changing skills requirement necessary to meet business needs, in particular an increased technology focus’. The most significant legal and regulatory matter that the team has dealt with recently is GDPR and e-commerce law compliance. In the next 12 months, expected challenges the business will have to face include going through change management to meet shifting customer needs in a fast evolving technology landscape. The legal team will assist this by creating efficiencies in legal operations required in the context of change management, for instance, through document automation and building a knowledge base to optimise the use of new technologies in the business such as block chain. According to Gama-Rose, the strategy of retaining legal talent in the team ‘is to hire individuals with the right cultural and skills fit and support them in building transformational assets in both their personal and professional skills for future career development’. Talking about the influence of recent developments in legal technology, she says: ‘We have identified opportunities to automate documentation and processes through the use of internal resources such as SharePoint, and have also worked with external service providers to update our supplier portal for the acceptance of terms of business and launched a new project to automate precedent documents’.