Team size: Seven

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

In the past year, we have been very much involved in two breakthrough projects for Toyota Asia. First, we established a joint venture company in Indonesia for full-service lease of commercial vehicles. This is in line with our global efforts to transform into a mobility company. The world is evolving rapidly, and we can no longer be just an automotive company. Second, in response to a rise in global enforcement for bribery, fraud and corruption related matters, there has been a region-wide initiative to further strengthen our anti-bribery and anti-corruption compliance framework and practice bringing us to globally accepted best practices. As we rebound from Covid-19 and work through the still largely uncertain business climate, ensuring that proper compliance frameworks are in place has never been more important.

As we enter the next decade, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

As the world grows increasingly smaller with the advances in virtual communication, it is important for a corporate legal team to be well-versed and comfortable to address various legal issues from multiple jurisdictions, including issues that may not be within their ordinary scope. Not to say that one needs to be an expert in every area of the law in every jurisdiction. That would be impossible. However, it is important to be able to identify and spot issues in various areas and be connected enough to local experts to resolve issues quickly. A legal team is the first point of contact for any legal and regulatory trouble in a company and a quick and substantive first response is essential to providing effective business support.

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

My suggestion is to ‘actively listen’ and ‘collaborate’ with business partners. It is often easy to fall into the trap that ‘the lawyer knows best’. While you may in fact know best how to, for example, manage legal issues, the business partners are often experts in their own fields. It is important to develop a collaborative work style and to be working level business partners. Very often I have seen in-house counsel who hide in the back office and refuse to sit at the negotiation table with their business partners. I have also heard of teams with such slow response times that they slow down the entire project schedule. The difference between being an external counsel and an in-house counsel is that the former is an external resource, whereas the latter must be with the businesspeople side-by-side. The viewpoints must be different.