Team size:   Four

What are the most significant cases or transactions that you have recently been involved in?

Early this year, we managed a business merger of two L’Oreal markets–L’Oreal Malaysia & L’Oreal Singapore. In addition, we negotiated a multi-million-dollar agreement with our newly appointed media planning and buying agency, Publicis Groupe.

During the lockdown, the legal team played an important role in the company’s initiatives to set up e-commerce platforms for the various brands and to be on marketplaces. The legal team was involved in every step of this process.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house lawyers in the future the most? Which have you found most useful in your legal team? 

I believe whole-heartedly in digital contracting, as this legal technology has taken business contracting processes to new heights for my company. It facilitates every step of the contracting process from automatic generation of contracts, online real time approvals, e-signatures to auto archiving. I am extremely glad we implemented digital contracting before the lockdown as users could create and sign contracts wherever they are at any time of the day.

As the company’s business expands each year, this means the number of contracts increases. Legal counsel need to free their time from low-risk high volume contracts to focus and prioritise complicated deals and compliance programs. As such, we legal engineered certain contracts in-house where users can easily generate contracts on their own. For example, we automated the workflow for our Professional Products Division where the sales teams can generate a commercial contract for the salons in 5 minutes just by keying in the necessary sales targets and KPIs. Close to a thousand salon contracts which meet the necessary company compliance norms are automated each year using this workflow. The division controllers are able to pull out commercial and financial data at any time to cross check the rebates and sales targets from the repository filters. This technology has provided us better visibility and data on all the contracts we have prepared and are working on.

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

To be proactive in setting up periodic meetings or catch ups with our business partners to understand what they do, the various trends and projects for the business and how we can be part of it. Take the initiative to be included in commercial meetings where there may not be any legal issue for discussion, but where in-house lawyers can learn how the business works. When our business partners trust us, they are not afraid to approach us to discuss transparently on issues and risks, thus reducing the need for legal teams to act reactively.