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

This year, we are handling several significant matters. Over the past few months, we have been negotiating an exclusive distribution agreement in North America with a prominent Japanese brand. Since the Japanese company has not previously conducted business in North America, the negotiations have been challenging. We have spent many late nights in meetings explaining our position through translators. Next month, we plan to travel to Japan, hoping to finalise the agreement. Earlier this year, we travelled to Canada to conduct a compliance review at our subsidiary there. It was our first time carrying out such a review at this location, providing us with the chance to better understand the complexities of Canadian law. We are now following up on the few deficiencies we identified. In the insurance area, we are auditing the Certificate of Insurance practices across all our companies in the US and Canada. We are also coordinating tabletop exercises to test our cybersecurity response. Additionally, we are auditing our trademark portfolio across client companies, expanding registrations where we identify any gaps. This year, we developed a trademark training to assist our clients in understanding how best to protect their trademarks moving forward. Finally, we have continued to improve our document retention practices, expanding the scope across all of North America.

Which recent political, economic or regulatory changes have impacted your work the most in the past year?

The most recent changes that have impacted our work the most this year are the Corporate Transparency Act, changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act, and changes to state sick leave laws. 

How does your legal team collaborate with other departments within the company?

Our legal team strives to work as collaboratively as possible with each department across our seven corporate clients. We do this by prioritising fast response times to any inquiries, with each client receiving a personal response within 24 hours of receipt. Following that, we seek to gain a clear understanding of the client’s expectations and then do our best to exceed them. Our team is unique in that most members work fully remotely. To stay on top of all assignments, we meet as a team each morning to discuss priorities and staffing. In collaboration with our corporate IT team, we have also recently deployed our own contract management system to help each of our client companies better manage their contracts.