About

Can you briefly explain how the legal team is structured, highlighting key individuals and their role within the department? The Bangalore hub of LeMANs (Legal Master Agreements Negotiations Team) is divided into two teams, the INK team and the PEM team. The INK Team comprises of three different activities – initiations, negotiations and knowledge management and supports three hubs in London, Hong Kong and New York. The team of negotiators are working on OTC derivative master agreements and clearing agreements. The PEM team handles all post execution activities for London, New York, Hong Kong and Bangalore as well as for prime legal teams in EMEA, Asia Pacific and AMER regions. The legal team has strong alignment with business and operational activity globally and therefore plays a key strategic role in the success of Société Générale’s OTC and prime markets ambitions. The team interacts directly both with external counterparts and with members of internal business divisions while also coordinating the efforts of credit, risk, operations and collateral teams who share responsibility for the success of SG’s client on-boarding activities.

What will be the main focus for the company in the next 12 months and how does the team intend to assist with this? Develop expertise and scope in negotiation (autonomy and coverage). We have devised a clear road map on skill assessment to determine the skill required and review the skill available for expansion of scope. Cover the gap in the skills with robust training mechanism. Build new standard operating procedure documents and guidance notes to help the team in scaling up to handle the new scope effectively. This new scope shall be assessed for quality review and feedback from the experienced subject matter experts and have periodic assessment of the quality and improve continuously to deliver the right quality product as per the agreed deliverables. How has the team harnessed technology to improve output or drive efficiencies? We have started projects on automation using AI/ML and NLP, built tools that have eliminated redundant manual processing and also improved the turnaround time and qualitative data. With the use of technology we convert the PDF documents to readable and editable text using OCR and then using a tool that is built in-house, we can identify the language required and update the field with the right output based on the machine learning that the tool has undergone per document type. This will eliminate the issues of formatting quality and would deliver a draft with consistent quality. The lawyer then just has to review the output fields and validate the document so that the same can be delivered in a tenth of the time it was taking earlier. This improved the efficiency of the team both in terms of turnaround time and quality of the drafts produced. The lawyers now can focus on core legal aspects and spend less time of formatting, or updating the referential systems of the organisation. Focus on…