Team size: 47

Key team members: Kathryn Ho, Yen Yu, Kevin Khan, Joanna Er, Philip Regondola, Cheryl Neo

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

Our team is involved in a wide gamut of work from transactional, commercial, regulatory, litigation, investigations, joint ventures to project development and execution, in addition to supporting our base businesses across Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Notable transactions include complex acquisitions and divestments involving joint venture partners with varying interests, country-wide restructuring of our group companies, brand licensing agreements, incident response from oil spills to cyber security, carbon offsets projects, complex take or pay arrangements in support of construction of petrochemical plants and the dismissal of more than 3,000 claims in a major litigation that spanned 25 years and across 2 continents. Our lawyers are valued advisors to the business, often leading cross-functional teams and participating in strategy and engagements to address long-standing issues with the government and other stakeholders. Our team is involved in several market re-entries through brand license arrangements in Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia. These transactions require cross-functional legal and commercial teams to lean into a growth mindset.

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?

Our team leveraged the suite of Microsoft business applications to create SharePoint self-help sites and low-tech automation tools to generate, track and perform activities across a matter’s lifecycle. The SharePoint self-help sites allow our clients to access useful legal resources like training materials, legal templates, legal advice for commonly asked questions, and links to relevant government websites and court decisions. The automation tools include automating information intake for contract reviews, first draft of contracts, appointment of directors and officers, litigation monitoring, to name a few efficient innovations. We have designed and deployed these tools across multiple client and internal legal workflows.

These initiatives have eliminated our lower-value work (e.g. recurring requests for templates, answering commonly asked questions and attending to status and coordination requirements with our clients and within the legal team), improved client satisfaction as clients could access what they need within their time zone for simpler questions, and freed up our team’s time to work on more complex matters and better serve our clients as their strategic advisors.

Apart from legal matters, has the team worked on other company initiatives?

We have a diverse team covering Asia Pacific, Europe Middle East and Africa, and inclusivity is very much a part of our culture to enhance camaraderie and collaboration. Each year, we plan a fun and meaningful calendar of Diversity & Inclusion trainings and events to ensure an inclusive workplace for our counsels and law professionals. We are passionate about giving back and have partnered with the National University of Singapore (NUS) to mentor law students, share the work of an in-house counsel and answer their career questions. In 2023, we also had our first summer intern from NUS coinciding with the Chevron global intern program, which afforded him the opportunity to participate in organised activities that included a Q&A with our Chevron CEO.

Our team actively supports the Corporation’s move to an integrated Oil, Products and Gas (OPG) enterprise through providing unified legal support, planning and participating in meaningful events and activities across the Upstream, Midstream and Downstream legal teams.

Our team also actively supports the Corporation’s energy transition efforts to lower carbon. These efforts include transactions across biofuels, hydrogen, carbon capture and offsets product lines, with key integrations into the base businesses that our teams support.