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

The most recent success was the obtaining of digital assets operator licenses from the Thai Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) within a period less than a year. Similar to some other digital assets regulators, the Thai SEC has been heavily lifting their standards after all the negative incidents hich have occurred in Thailand and worldwide. Hence, we are proud to say that we are one of the first license grantees under the new standard.

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?

Actually, I wouldn’t call it an innovation but rather a change of working style and mindset. To me, the largest expense that of high-tech working tools or fancy software, but manpower cost. Imagine how many man hours or meetings were used for the business team to brainstorm and come up with an idea or a new business proposal, which sometimes will not be feasible for simple regulatory reasons. What if we as GCs have been involved with them since the beginning, so we can endorse or stop something before it goes too far. Or even better, if a GC has a very good understanding of his or her business they can propose a new idea to the team instead.
For my legal team, we don’t consider ourselves as a back line resource. Rather, we will be at the front line with other teams, and proactively use our expertise to jointly drive the business, with the best interests of the company in mindwhile maintaining full regulatory compliance. The simple tool to create this mindset is a “shared KPI” for all teams across the entire company. With this, it is a goal for everyone to drive the business forward while maintaining full regulatory compliance at the same time.

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

I think we will see the trend of combining legal and compliance functions to be under one leader; especially those in fintech or other regulated industries. With the speed of response required and the complexity of regulations, it will be totally inefficient to have them in separated teams. A combined function would serve the business as a single go-to point for any legal and regulatory matters, and ultimately benefit the company as a whole.

As we enter the next decade, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

Good knowledge and understanding in “I” technologies (as in IT infrastructure, system integration, or even IT security) and data management (such as data warehouse, data analytic, data recording) are a must-have skill for corporate legal teams. This knowledge has been, and will continue to become, a major consideration for our legal analysis, since we are all moving towards ever-greater technological advancement, and this will never stop changing.