What are the most significant cases or transactions that you have been involved in over the past year?

I have been involved with transactions that enable partnership with various top entertainment companies to make world-class game products. The negotiation for these transactions can be an arduous process and can take more than a year, mainly because both parties involved are seasoned industry leaders with unwavering viewpoints, making it difficult to meet each other halfway. I have found that patience and a willingness to accept the other side’s interests as genuine, while trying to come up with compromises that benefit both parties, are key to closing these complex deals successfully.

What innovations have you made to the way your legal team works in the past year?

I am in the process of introducing documents that will serve as guidelines for all contract negotiations involving our core businesses. Instead of moving from one deal to another without taking a pause to reflect and learn, my team takes time to pay close attention to what happens in each stage of negotiation, documenting negotiation strategies and tactics, fallback positions, challenges encountered, and ways in which we overcome such challenges to reach agreements. Documents that encapsulate these key factors that have made deals possible will simplify the negotiation process for the better and dramatically reduce time and effort in future negotiations. Another challenge we face is that there are other legal teams serving different business partners within the organisation, and they often run into counterparts that my team already negotiated with and vice versa. The documents my team is working on will also help different legal teams have one voice on many key issues, improving consistency and efficiency on how our company conducts negotiations and structures deals.

Based on your experience, what is the key to collaborating successfully with business partners?

I think the key role that in-house counsel should play to collaborate successfully with business partners is giving them a full picture of what is at stake in the long run, in any given problem they hope to resolve or deals they want to close quickly. Of course, it is important to ask questions to understand what immediate and concrete goal the business team wants to accomplish and ensure that any strategic advice that the legal team gives is in service of that goal. That could be a revenue target they have to meet for this quarter or a product initiative that core fans are anxiously waiting to see released within this year. But once I find out what they want to do commercially, I always put conscious efforts to explain what kind of long-term legal risks they can face if they do not take time and think about what is going to be more beneficial for the company’s reputation and prosperity over a longer period. A business partner may be driven to close the deal as soon as possible, but a contract that gets signed without all the necessary terms and conditions fleshed out, leaving it all up to discussions later, can have severe consequences when a dispute happens later, especially when people who negotiated the contract are gone and everyone is confused as to what to make of it. This requires in-house counsel to explain to the business partner clearly what those long-term consequences will be, not to scare them off but to help them understand that we may need one more call or exchange of emails and redlines rather than rushing to close the matter. I believe that lawyers who establish authority by explaining practical risks that business partners do not see but should care about are the ones who can ultimately establish trust and mutual respect.