Team size: Four

Key team members: Vernon Jude Samuel, Cheyenne Chan, Lee Zhun Yu, Ilecia Ong

We support the wholesale, retail and assembly productions of Mercedes-Benz passenger cars and spare parts for Malaysia with nine general distributor markets around Southeast Asia. Additionally, the team supports Mercedes-Benz Malaysia’s regional overseas experience centre, critical parts management, human resource shared services, and regional corporate security, which are all overseas hub services that offer services to countries apart from Malaysia. The department also serves as the company’s process management office, which oversees all company policies, procedures, and operational guidelines to ensure that they comply with our ISO standards.

Can you sum up the team culture or ethos, and give us a breakdown of what makes your legal team function so well?

The motto of the department is “To Enable, To Protect and To Defend”. We strive to enable the business, protect the interests of the shareholder, and defend the company’s interests.

In our day-to-day work life, we adopt the principle laid down by our general counsel in Germany, which is that the legal department should be a department of how instead of a department of no. The team focuses on understanding respective stakeholders and what their needs are so that our advice, strategies, and solutions are business oriented, thus, driving the success of the company.