Team size: Five

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

In April 2022, PwC globally closed its $2.2bn sale of Global Mobility Tax and Immigration Services business to a U.S. private equity firm, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. At the local firm level, Mekong OGC team managed the local deal entirely in-house. This is one of the most complicated M&A deals I have ever experienced, as the deal involved with selling firms in more than 100 jurisdictions and collaboration among a large group of in-house lawyers was quite challenging.

In April 2022, we teamed up with Herbert Smith Freehills Thailand as defence attorney in the first-ever securities class-action lawsuit in country’s history, and we successfully managed to convince the court to dismiss the lawsuit without going to trial.

Did the pandemic lead to a lasting increase in the interaction your legal team has with the strategic plans of the company?

Before the pandemic, the role of in-house counsel might be quite passive as the in-house support was limited to requests raised by the business. However, as we were forced to work remotely (without knowing when the pandemic would end), a legal department could not just remain passive. As a new normal, we had to be highly proactive, to think of innovative ways to respond to changes and uncertainties driven by the pandemic, and how we could provide human-led, tech-powered legal solutions to the business. Rather than a team of advisors, our in-house team transformed itself to become a team of problem solvers, coming together in unexpected ways to deliver more efficient, faster, and better outcomes for organisations and their stakeholders: this corresponds to “The New Equation” strategy recently launched by PwC Global Network.

During the pandemic, we have adopted technologies and tools to support our internal legal services, for example, communication tools via Google G-Suite, document execution via DocuSign, consultation via DigitalMaker, privacy management via OneTrust and a few more tools internally developed for legal-related workflow and business processes.

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

As many legal departments (including our OGC team) are overburdened with repetitive work in reviewing basic contracts such as non-disclosure agreements (NDA), a modern technology that helps with contract standardisation and automation will make lawyers’ lives much easier. We are exploring the adoption of a universal model NDA template created by OneNDA, which has recently been adopted by PwC UK. OneNDA will save so much time, costs, and efforts for the two parties in negotiating and streamlining contracting processes.