Team size: 23

Key team members: Simon Wilkes, Sophia Au-Yeong, Clarice Ngan, Rinita Sen

Focus on… Our Legal Team

In the fluid and fast-paced media and entertainment industry, the Astro Legal team has adapted and evolved to meet changing demands with a progressive approach. The team has honed its expertise in innovative legal issues and found new ways of working to provide quick and flexible advice and support.

Having identified the need to change its operating model to address challenges, including increasingly high volumes of contracts and a need for clarity with business units surrounding allocating roles and responsibilities, the team looked at how it could work smarter and improve efficiency. The starting point was a vision statement focusing on being trusted and collaborative advisors, providing effective commercial support through technology, legal expertise and innovative ideas while prioritising professional growth and personal well-being.

Using this vision statement as a guide, the team reviewed its core and non-core tasks, identifying the strategic, complex and high-value tasks which should be controlled and managed by the team themselves and separating tasks that were low value but high volume and which could, therefore be better resourced through automation and outsourcing.

The team also conducted a maturity assessment, examining the four key areas of people, processes, technology and data. It assessed where the team was at that point in time concerning each, how it could improve and the end goal for every area. This was complemented by a survey conducted of both the team itself and the business units it supported, seeking feedback on processes, responsibilities and communication.

The results from all of these activities have now fed into the creation of an ‘as is’ and ‘to be’ operating model for the team, a roadmap for the coming years of new initiatives, a technology blueprint and a set of business requirements to expand the use of legal tech. Meanwhile, members of the Astro Legal team have started to build these into their KPIs so that each individual remains invested in improving how the team works.

These changes have refined the functionality of the Astro Legal team to confidently meet the challenges of providing legal support to a business that requires quick turnarounds and out-of-the-box thinking. The team culture and ethos have been reframed to encourage adaptability and flexibility. Workflows and operating models have become more focused and streamlined. Most importantly, employee engagement has increased significantly.