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

In the past year, we have had a huge focus on reviewing and revising our existing compliance programs due to the new regulations and laws that have been enacted since we started the program in 2012. This involved a very granular review of new laws and regulations to see where they impact our operations and how we needed to reallocate resources to ensure that we are 100% compliant with all applicable laws. Another area of focus was leveraging on the technology available to ensure that we work smarter, not necessarily harder. We continued to develop in-house tools and technologies to shorten turnaround time, to automate approvals or denials of more transactional work, which allowed us to focus on more critical or complex work.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

We developed the “Philippine Legal Portal” which makes use of robotic process automation to receive queries from our internal stakeholders. The system ensures that specific questions or requests are automatically approved or disapproved based on responses to pre-prepared, frequently asked questions. If further review is needed, these inquiries are routed to the appropriate lawyer who is the point of contact (POC) for the relevant area of law. It also contains a searchable warehouse of external counsel opinion and previous advice we have given which allows us to monitor precedents. This has significantly cut down our volume of work as well as sped up the turnaround time for responses as it does away with the manual hand-offs and emails.

How do you see the general counsel role evolving in the Philippines over the next five-ten years?

With the growing cost of external counsel, I think GCs will be called upon to be more agile and responsive to different aspects and areas of law more than before. We will need to be up to date, conversant and knowledgeable about the businesses we support and be less of an advisor and more of a partner. We will need to be more pragmatic and comfortable with working in the grey areas of law where legislation has not caught up with the technologies that have developed such as the regulation of AI, cloud computing and other technologies that are still unregulated.

How do you motivate and manage your legal team well?

Open and honest feedback and communication as well as opportunities for face-to-face engagement activities were key to our team. My team knows that I am always available to speak and to listen.