Team size: 12

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

In April 2023, the Dusit Legal Department assisted Dusit Foods Company Limited (Dusit Foods), as subsidiary of Dusit Thani Public Company Limited, with preparing, negotiating and entering into a joint venture agreement with Farm To Plate Processer Company Limited (F2P), an innovative food development company having rich experience in hospitality, product development, sales & marketing with a market presence across the world through its offices in Thailand, USA, and India, to form a joint venture company to operate business of ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook food via central kitchen and cloud food dispensing network in Thailand.

This joint venture will establish a joint venture company, namely Savor Eats Company Limited (Savor Eats), in which Dusit Foods holds 51% and F2P holds 49% of its total share capital. This joint venture is part of Dusit Foods’ expansion strategy to cover a variety of foods, such as healthy foods (KAUAI brand), bread and bakery (Bonjour brand) and ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook food to be operated by Savor Eats.

Savor Eats is formed to be disruptive and purpose driven company that aims to provide sustainable food & beverage solutions with specially curated services, experiences and uniquely crafted menus by its internal culinary experts and key culinary collaborations across the region. Savor Eats caters to both B2C and B2B segments through its various business verticals.

How do you see the general counsel role evolving in Thailand over the next five to ten years?

The role of the general counsel has evolved from being merely a legal advisor to the expected roles in key business activities and strategic directions. General counsel require broad business knowledge and an ever-broader skill set in performing their duty. They need to develop other attributes, such as additional business knowledge and leadership skills. General counsel will find technology to help them streamline workflow and process to save time for them, so that they can focus on developing additional business knowledge and leadership skills.

Despite the massive disruption in the business and legal landscape caused by Covid-19, the strategic priorities for in-house legal departments have not changed. While general counsel need to ensure that they can keep their organisations complying with laws and regulations, the goal of improving productivity and operational efficiency remains their top priority. Therefore, it would be crucial for the general counsel to keep technological evolution in mind and continue to increase the use of technology to improve efficiency.

However, a successful digital transformation requires a clear understanding of the legal and operational functions required for the success of an organisation. Technology solutions should be tailored to the challenges and priorities in the organisation. I believe that appropriate workflow tools, collaborative platforms and document management systems are still the key tools that will improve working efficiency in legal departments.

What are some of the main legislative or regulatory changes that have impacted you?

Thailand has enacted the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA), effective in June 2022. Data privacy issues can be a major risk within the hospitality industry; most businesses in the hospitality industry collect customer data such as personal preferences, health, spending patterns and financial information to provide customised services better and increase customer satisfaction. We can see that, although the operators have been doing their best to safeguard customers’ data, significant data breach incidents exposing customers’ personal information have occurred. The legal team has been playing a vital role in doing all we can to help the DPO and the wider organisation to lower the risk of data incidents or manage such crises. Gaps analysis has been conducted to identify risk areas and actions to be taken to fill the gaps, comply with the new PDPA and reduce risks associated with customer data. Many tasks need to be done and implemented, but we must continue to comply with the law and regulations and safeguard our customers’ data.