Team size: Eight

Key team members: Jonty Vavasour (general counsel and company secretary) and Crystal Kong (legal director)

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

The Bupa Hong Kong legal team has been involved in a variety of significant transactions and matters over the past year. Front and centre, we have been partnering with the business to deliver on our core strategy of becoming the world’s most customer-centric healthcare company and delivering Connected Care (insurance and health provision) to our Hong Kong customers. Aligned to this strategy, the team has been a key enabler in developing our new digital front door, the Blua app, which has been designed to personalise care for our customers and combine our health insurance and health provision services in one frictionless space. Another visible transaction was agreeing a two-year sponsorship deal with the Hong Kong Rugby Football Union for the annual Hong Kong Rugby Sevens. This has seen Bupa being recognised as their official healthcare partner and further promoting our wellbeing brand.

Privacy and data protection is never far from our consideration, and given the dynamic nature of this issue, we have undertaken a comprehensive review and update of all our privacy notices and consents to ensure they are transparent and reflect best practice. On the M&A front, we are opportunistically acquisitive in our health services business and have added several new clinics in the Ophthalmology, Traditional Chinese Medicine and D&I space.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

We are currently experimenting with the use of Josef Legal, a legal automation tool. We are finding this is a cost-effective way to automate some menial contracts (eg, NDAs), and frees up the team to focus on more high value strategic work. On a slightly different tangent we are also trialling internal secondments within the legal team. Currently, Bupa Hong Kong offers both insurance and health provision to our customers, and we have traditionally had two separate teams along these service lines. We are now experimenting with swapping people from insurance to health services and vice versa to broaden their exposure of work and encourage a ‘one Bupa’ approach to our advice.

Can you sum up the team culture in one sentence?

‘High performers in everything we do.’