Team size: Six

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

In July 2022, Haleon, one of the biggest consumer healthcare companies in the world, launched as an independent company focused on consumer health, completing its demerger from GSK. Working on the separation and restructuring activities involved advising on extremely complex transactions with multiple internal and external jurisdiction compliance aspects including the complex disentanglement of arrangements and ownership rights, complex transitional arrangement to be put in place, go-to-market model changes; separation of key supplier and other contracts; interacting and securing required authorities’ approvals relating to the demerger, all within a very tight timeline. Even after the demerger, we continue to play an instrumental role in guiding the business on entity name change of the various legal entities within the group from GSK to Haleon.

We have been a key and active member of the cross-functional Southeast Asia and Taiwan project team, aiming to drive efficiency and remove unnecessary bureaucracy in the internal review and approval processes of marketing and other promotional materials and activities. The Southeast Asia and Taiwan Legal team successfully identified simplification initiatives including removing the need for unnecessary checks and provided additional tools to enable speedy and informed decision-making.

We often receive questions relating to contracting processes. To ensure that our internal business clients are able to readily get answers to these questions quickly and also to avoid our need to repeat our advice to these easy questions relating to contracts, we compiled an easily accessible, user friendly database of FAQs and decision-trees on contracting and on the need for legal review. This also helped us refocus our time on addressing and supporting more complex legal queries.

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?

To ensure the accessibility of the contracting FAQ, decision-tree and corporate entity information databases, the legal team embedded the links to these commonly used or accessed database in our email signature block.

Can you sum up the team culture or ethos?

However, a unifying characteristic of the Southeast Asia and Taiwan markets is that it is a high growth region in a fast-moving and dynamic external environment, especially in the digital space. To ensure that we are well placed to enable our business to grow in such a region while protecting it is imperative to collaborate and do what is right for the company.

We do this by building strong relationships and networks within the organisation take care to not complicate issues and matters but work towards simple solutions without compromising adequate controls and governance.

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

We set up a central contracting group staffed with lawyers who support the review and drafting of lower risk contracts. The Southeast Asia and Taiwan Legal Team play an important role in ensuring the success of this model by collaborating with the central contracting group in deploying this to the local teams and keep the contracting group apprised of relevant local nuances or laws.

The team participated in setting up a central outside counsel management team to help with negotiating and establishing law firm engagements based on standard engagement terms of the company. Our role is in identifying the appropriate outside counsel firm to engage with and to provide input on the appropriateness of fee proposals given our understanding of the local legal industry environment in this region.

We also took part in the deployment of a matter’s intake portal where, for central contracting, outside counsel engagement and certain types of legal support requests, the requestor needs to log their request into an intake portal. Apart from triaging to appropriate and available legal support, this enables proper tracking matters which can be analysed for future decision-making.