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

I lead Recap’s team in closing out the negotiations with GS and ADIA as well as working with the onshore team for the closing of the deal.

I also lead all deals for Recap and SC Capital throughout the region and not just Vietnam. I assist the team with all legal work and review from cradle to grave (from acquisitions, through to operations and management, and development if such investment includes development, and finally through to divestment). I report directly to the managing partners. SC Capital Partners manages Recap funds, including our opportunistic funds, our decarbonised fund, data centre fund as well as the Japan hotel recovery fund. Thus, at any one point in time, I will have to look after new acquisitions, dispositions, operational and management and development matters, litigation if needed, refinancing – anything from an NDA to JVAs, financing documents, to syndication to arbitration, litigation, and settlements.

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?

If there is work that we can handle internally, we will. I work closely with external counsel to ensure their scopes are fine-tuned and costs are controlled. Due to my 20+ experience in the legal profession, both as an external lawyer as well as in-house, I can appreciate the need to be specific in our instructions as well as a particular way of communicating with our lawyers so that we get our instructions across.

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

In the last 15 years, the role of lawyers in Vietnam have gained enormous weight and trust. I believe that there is still a big gap to be filled and room for improvement for lawyers in Vietnam to be more commercial centric, and not too legalistic. I believe in the next five years we will see more involvement of lawyers in personal transactions, but we still have a long way to go to reach how lawyers are seen and considered as part of the system in other developed countries, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia.