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

In the last couple of years, UEM Edgenta has had a paradigm shift in its role and vision to become a regional tech-enabled asset management leader. We established Edgenta NXT in 2021, our in-house digital venture that has developed three proprietary technology products: Asseto, Asseto for Health and Quickmed. As the deputy general counsel of UEM Edgenta, I lead the corporate, M&A and intellectual property/tech team. In the last couple of years, we have been heavily involved in digitalisation initiatives across various business segments, from protecting our intellectual property assets to the marketing, distribution plan and licensing of Asseto and other products to our clients across Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and the Middle East. We advised on the licensing structure and relevant agreements to implement Software-as-a-Service, thus enabling our businesses to ink large contracts with building operators.

The company has also been growing our international presence through organic and inorganic growth, and our team was instrumental in partially acquiring an established facility management company in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, facilitating UEM Edgenta’s entry into this high-growth market. There are current plans in place for further in-roads into KSA and UAE that we are working on, which will be announced in due time.

My team and I have also worked very hard in recent months to provide legal support towards the partnership with several strategic partners such as ITMAX Systems and Disrupt-X to spearhead end-to-end, IoT-based integrated facilities management and smart city solutions in the Middle East. While these are cutting-edge projects that require high technical skills, it has been an exhilarating journey for us as a team, and we have learned and grown so much in our knowledge and understanding of the business. Nonetheless, it has kept us up many nights!

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

This is a subject matter that is close to my heart. The modern in-house legal team should be collaborative and genuinely engaged with other departments to meet the objectives and vision of the company and achieve success across the whole business. As in-house lawyers, it is almost as important, if not more important, to establish and maintain strong relationships with our business partners/stakeholders as it is to deliver sound technical legal advice, and one of the key ways to do this is by providing workable and commercially-sound solutions, rather than acting as ‘roadblocks’ to every deal or new initiative proposed by the business units. I believe having a culture of engagement, clear communication, and a collaborative attitude in our dealings with internal and external stakeholders, particularly colleagues, C-suites, the board, and even external counsel, is paramount. The legal team should also participate actively in company-wide events, town halls, management discussions, and sports activities, build relationships with colleagues from other departments in formal and informal settings, and strive to learn the business better. The strong relationships forged will translate to better understanding, clearer communication and more support from the broader business regarding legal decisions and having a healthy foundation for discussions and debates, both in good and challenging times.