Team size: 13

Key team members: James Bidlake, Ryan Mark, Ingrid de Jerphanion and Phoebe Guo

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

DFS has one of the few in-house legal teams based in Hong Kong that looks after a global business, rather than just a regional business. From a team consisting of one lawyer and two paralegals in 2017 (whenJames Bidlake became the group general counsel) to a team of 13 today, DFS legal and compliance has become a center of excellence and trusted partner to our business colleagues. Our growth is a symbol of our success.

Covid-19 severely disrupted the travel retail industry globally and necessitated significant changes in the way that DFS, the world’s leading luxury travel retailer, conducted its business and demanded the DFS legal team to be agile and resilient in meeting these challenges, and work more collaboratively than ever with our strategic partners. The legal team continues to build upon these strengths and plays an instrumental role in assisting the company to adapt to the new post-Covid environment through nurturing even deeper relationships with our customers and stakeholders across the world.

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?

One of the important efficiencies that our legal team implemented is the increased use of standardised and updated contract templates, combined with training to empower people to use the templates. The templates are also standardised across different locations, which ensures that we are using consistent language and terms. Another innovation we have implemented is using a contract management tool to digitalise our contract database, which has made it much easier for us to track and manage our contracts. We can now easily see which contracts are due for renewal, which contracts need to be reviewed and which contracts are live. Both are foundational elements of an online contract management system that we plan to launch later this year. This is a bespoke development tool, and we are very excited about the efficiencies it will bring.

Apart from legal matters, has the team worked on other company initiatives?

In addition to legal matters, our legal team has also worked on several other company initiatives. For example, we have a dedicated compliance team that works on compliance with LVMH (our parent company) policies (such as conflict of interest declarations), and we have an ethics and compliance committee chaired by our CEO and general counsel. We have developed various policies and procedures to ensure that the company is operating ethically and in a socially responsible manner.