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

We have recently closed a US$578m Series E investment from Alibaba and GeoPost. I successfully negotiated the transactional documents and led the legal team through a comprehensive and in-depth due diligence exercise across seven countries that was satisfactory to the investors.

We designed and implemented a Group Regulatory Compliance Framework that saw consistent policies and processes managing regulatory risks (privacy, anti-corruption, and business licensing) introduced across seven countries, where we have more than 60,000 staff. This was done in-house with minimal external legal support.

As we onboard hundreds of new shippers every week across seven countries, I have designed and implemented a digital agreement process whereby agreements’ details and prices are automatically populated, and the agreements are digitally signed via and stored in a single platform. This is a mandatory requirement before we start services, and this efficient process enables us to close very high numbers of contracts quickly and in a standardised manner that meets our Contracting Standards.

In general, what would you like to see change about the external law firms you use?

The decades old process of exchanging drafts and providing instructions via email should be eliminated. I would like to see firms using cloud-hosted platforms (for example, Google Workspace) where project participants can see, within one digital workspace, all documents and drafts in real-time and all historical changes and instructions.

All relevant documents are in one workspace and all instructions are in one chat group – so all project participants have one single-source of truth to refer to.

Drafts are shared, edited and commented on a cloud-based word processor, where all project participants can collaborate in real time and changes are clearly attributable.

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

A good working knowledge of information systems and cloud hosted applications, and how they interact and communicate with one another, and laws relating to digital transactions.

This enables the counsel to understand dataflows, operational risks, and impact on privacy and sanction obligations of the organisation. With this, counsel can give comprehensive and correct legal advice against the digital environment that organisations operate in.