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

Mamee’s legal team, headed by myself, handles the full spectrum of legal works ranging from labour issues to corporate exercises, dispute resolution, and intellectual property.

Even though the team is relatively small, we are proud to say that we handle most of the legal work in-house, juggling the day-to-day operations and the special projects, including corporate exercises.

One of the most challenging parts of the work is to advise the stakeholders not only on the legal aspects of the transaction but also the commercial aspects. For example, in a typical appointment of a distributor, the latter often requests exclusivity over a specific territory. Suppose the commercial team decides to concede to the request. In that case, we must build enough exits or leeway in the agreement to ensure that the distributor is underperforming and the company can exit quickly.

As for corporate exercises, the group has recently invested in US and Singapore companies. We assisted in the negotiation and finalisation of the documents. On top of the usual M&A, we recently had to manage the legal aspect of an internal reorganisation concerning an incentive granted to the group. We have to relook at all the existing template agreements used by the group to ensure that the business interest is protected under the new corporate structure. We have had to novate all arrangements from the relevant subsidiaries to the principal hub entity. As part of the internal reorganisation, we must also carry out a large-scale assignment of the relevant and active trademark across multiple jurisdictions from the original proprietor to the principal hub entity.

On the compliance front, we have had to assist in international employment standards compliance. As Mamee’s supply to customers originated from Western countries, we must adhere to higher international labour standards. The legal team have had to negotiate with the customers to close the gap between the labour standards of the Western countries and Malaysia standards. To add insult to injury, we have had to attend to a crisis involving a human rights activist who challenges our human rights policy and our policies and SOP concerning hiring foreign labour.

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?

Traditionally, we have kept hard copies of the source documents with scattered or piecemeal information on the trademarks owned by the company. In addition, all trademark application requests have always been submitted to the legal team in hard copies with manual signing approval.

We have recently established our in-house trademark database to manage the group’s entire trademark portfolio. With the tight budget in mind, instead of signing up and subscribing to a third-party service, with our IT department’s help, we created our IP database using Microsoft Excel. We use the search and filter function to manage the Group IP portfolio and to extract information easily to be shared with our internal stakeholders.

We have also created e-forms for internal stakeholders to complete new trademark applications using the existing company IT infrastructure.