Team size: Seven

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

We are an apparel e-commerce company with distinguishing body measurement technology that enables us to offer better-fitting clothing and shoes. Recently, we customised this technology for a new area for us, fitness, by offering a body measurement and management tool for fitness enthusiasts.

Body data is important personal data, and its safe handling is a critical concern for consumers. Our legal team made many recommendations to drive the business while ensuring legal safety, and we succeeded in launching the business on time.

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

For better performance of each legal team member, we have reduced information gaps as much as possible and prepared an environment in which each legal team member can make sufficient decisions within their discretion. To avoid excessive hierarchical relationships within the legal department due to positional hierarchies, we tried to flatten the relationship by calling each other’s name “-san”, a Japanese universal honorific suffix, used for every worker while maintaining Japanese courtesy.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values?

We can build good relationships with law firms that have a stance of trying to understand the business, can come up with ideas for risk control that are specific and realistic with an understanding of our actual situation and circumstances, as well as pure legal analysis, and have built a good network with overseas law firms. As our business has expanded and will continue to expand in Asia, the US, Europe, and elsewhere, we can achieve better results when a domestic law firm serves as a hub, communicating and controlling the local law firms for us.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

In-house lawyers are expected to understand how the business side thinks and uses jargon, to use a common language with them to better facilitate communication, to provide higher quality explanations and questions, and to elicit their wonderful ideas. A positive attitude to new business challenges is optional but very important.

Also, it is important to try to quantitatively assess the risks and to increase the resolution for the business unit by giving clearer views of the multiplication of the probability of occurrence of the risk and the level of damage.