Team size: Four

Key team members: Gregory Leong, Vanessa Sutanto, Rowena Ng, Moi Hui Huang

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

The past year has been an exciting time for WeWork and our Southeast Asia legal team. With Southeast Asia’s reopening and return to office, we have been busy closing various deals to maintain WeWork’s high occupancy levels across the Southeast Asia portfolio.

We continue to support WeWork’s sales teams in agreement drafting and their negotiations with a wide range of companies, from start-ups to social media giants and tech unicorns to financial institutions and government agencies.

Our team has also spearheaded several key initiatives to empower our business functions’ negotiation skills and enhance their legal knowledge to improve overall deal efficiency. First, WeWork’s Southeast Asia legal team steered the update of our international playbooks and templates to align them with our member companies’ most current concerns. Additionally, we launched our Legal 101 training sessions to communicate legal concepts and information in condensed, bite-sized portions to make legal training more engaging and interactive.

Can you sum up the team culture or ethos?

Kindness and effectiveness are paramount in our day-to-day interactions. Having helped the business navigate a plethora of challenges since 2019, including the Covid-19 pandemic, we nurtured a deep appreciation of one another’s unique attributes and the diversity of perspectives. We champion each individual and treat everyone with kindness, respect, gratitude, and empathy.

We also work with a strong bias for action.  We ensure that the guidance and advice we render to the business is concise, clear, practical, and actionable. This focus on effectiveness means we consistently work together with a shared purpose.

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?

In March 2023, we launched the Legal Lunch Roulette, where we dedicate time to meet with our community teams across Singapore. This initiative has allowed us to build essential relationships with our frontline colleagues, while conversely allowing them to better understand how the legal team thinks about risks and what information we need to problem solve effectively. The increased understanding and access to the Southeast Asia Legal Team has improved the quality of legal escalations, allowing us to better tailor our guidance and advice to the business. It has also proved popular, with other business functions being slated for future rounds of the programme.

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

With the reopening of Singapore, we have been able to support diversity and inclusivity initiatives.

In late 2022, we helped to spearhead a collaboration between WeWork and Q Chamber (Singapore’s first LGBTQ+ and allied chamber of commerce) to host their November 2022 event. The Singapore event brought together more than 100 attendees and was organised in conjunction with other Pride initiatives across WeWork’s Southeast Asia jurisdictions.

In June 2023, we partnered with Inclusively Asia and facilitated the return of the Inclusive Careers Fair by structuring the venue sponsorship of our flagship location. Through this, we were able to play our part in supporting the ecosystem of inclusive workplaces, and ultimately provide a platform to bolster the growth of a more inclusive society.