About

Supporting the Asia Pacific operations of Equinix, a world-leading global data centre provider and a business recognised by Forbes as one of the fastest growing technology companies in the US, is an industry-award-winning legal team of 17 members headed by Asia Pacific vice president – legal Yolande Goh. As a response to covering such a large geographical area and Equinix’s aggressive business expansion and growth, the team has more than doubled in size in the last two years; it now handles the company’s wide portfolio of legal, regulatory, compliance and corporate secretariat work such as M&A transactions, contractual negotiations with Fortune 500 clients, complex real estate and construction deals, expansion into new markets and all other legal and regulatory matters. One of the most important deals the regional legal function assisted on in 2017 was Equinix’s competitive bid for and successful acquisition of Metronode, one of Australia’s leading data centre businesses. The AU$1.03bn Metronode acquisition is the largest M&A transaction in the data centre industry in Asia Pacific to date, and will further strengthen Equinix’s leadership position in the region and support its on-going global expansion. They were also involved on the company’s 2015 purchase of Bit-Isle, a publicly listed company on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, for approximately US$280m. Explaining how her department works after securing these significant deals, Goh says, ‘our team is required to support all aspects of the cross-functional integration exercise which spans across different functions including sales, tax, finance, information technology, our contracts management system and employment. The integration often includes on-boarding a suite of brand new products, employees and the harmonisation of company policies in accordance with domestic laws. Being a key function of the integration exercise, our team is required to have an exceptional understanding of the IT and data centre business as well as the ability to effectively tailor advice to specific industry, function and domestic regulations. As a result of this, as well as the alignment of our global legal strategy, our team members have all individually developed the necessary expertise and are subject matter experts in our respective various areas of work’. A number of private practice lawyers spoke glowingly of the team, with one nominator saying: ‘They are a skilled and experienced team with the right mix of ex-practitioners and corporate counsel and a good gearing of experience ranging from 20 years plus to junior levels. They cover the entire Asia Pacific region for a range of legal support covering billion-dollar acquisitions, customer contracts, compliance and regulatory, data protection, employment and tax issues. The variety of work they handle is challenging but they always seem to be in control’.