Team size: 10

Key team members: Hironori Fujita, Marie-Celena Koh, Chua Ei-Leen, Goh Chao Qin, Faith Lim, Tan Jia Xin, Sandra Wong, Clarice Tan and Riena Goh

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

In our continuous effort to drive the One Suntory connection globally, and to strengthen our identity as part of Suntory Group, we have been in the process of harmonising our group company names and their internal abbreviations for the past two years.

This exercise is not as easy as it sounds, given that it involves more than 20 entities over the Asia Pacific region. Adding to the complexity is also that in such situations, operations may be impacted (licenses and trademarks may be tied to the name of the company).

Our team worked with local counsel as well as the operations teams to find reasonable and efficient ways to complete this exercise. In the process, we have made certain name changes or set up new trading names. We also worked with our corporate communications team to give an update of the situation and ensure that the updated internal abbreviations and protocol are communicated properly.

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 have been struggling to come up with an efficient way of managing our emails without incurring costs. There were some systems being explored but they either could not be re-integrated into another system which was to be implemented a year later, organisation wide, or was too costly.

Finally, Sandra and Clarice devised an efficient manner to store emails on OneDrive and no additional costs will be incurred.

We created self-serve legal templates, which our internal clients could use directly without seeking our support or approval. This was achieved by streamlining our legal templates (for example, non-disclosure agreements, and service agreements) to make them extremely user-friendly. Further, our clients are only required to fill in information (for example, parties’ names, commencement and expiry dates) in a table on the first page of each template.

We also created a webpage which housed the new self-serve legal templates on our corporate intranet (at no cost), which our internal clients could access easily. This webpage is also linked to our contract management and DocuSign systems, such that the signed contract can be filed automatically onto the contract management system (after simple verification). To make it user-friendly, we have also self-created and uploaded on the webpage a video showing the process from end-to-end.

Can you sum up the team culture or ethos?

No man is an island and increasingly, we have noticed that even as we work on different portfolios, the struggles are similar.

As such, we have embarked on a One-Suntory legal journey, where we partner and leverage the experience and expertise of each other, to create a stronger team together.

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

Our team also covers risk management (ERM, business continuity management and crisis management) and compliance in addition to legal. We work closely with Suntory’s global risk management and compliance community. Also, in the APAC region, we have worked together with compliance colleagues in the markets to conduct region-wide compliance program called “Compliance Season” to roll out common e-learning modules with unified communications.

Does your team make use of interesting technology solutions to streamline its workload?

It is something that is at the top of our minds constantly.

Covid-19 forced legal into digitalisation and we took baby steps from there to implement digital signatures, and build a depository of legal documents through Sharepoint.

With the One Suntory legal team spirit in mind, we constantly share experiences with our lawyers of the region. One of the interesting solutions that we have started to use was the ‘Power Automate’ function, which we now use to automate processes like tracking confidentiality undertakings, timelines or updating out of office team calendars, which used to be done manually.