In-house legal advisers flex to cope with new risk
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Business leaders and their legal advisers across the world are being forced to react quickly to a wave of threats created by tariff and trade wars, geopolitical conflict and gloomy economic prospects.
These new uncertainties are prompting a greater focus on improving risk management, curbing operating costs and remaining strategically nimble. In-house legal teams are in the mix to play their part.
Chee Kin Lam, general counsel at DBS Bank in Singapore, says increased volatility, complexity and uncertainty require a legal team “to double down on innovation in a few key areas”.
One theme to emerge from in-house teams featured in the FT Asia-Pacific Innovative Lawyers 2025 report is their efforts to increase efficiency and control costs by rolling out new technologies, including applications that exploit generative artificial intelligence.
But another theme is how teams are encouraging their staff to broaden their perspectives in order to track new and unpredictable risks better.
For many, this has meant new attempts to build lawyers’ cross-disciplinary skills and relationships across their organisations. DBS last year piloted a scheme, Project Alpha, in which four people from across the legal and compliance team were trained to handle tasks outside their usual roles. For example, a transactional lawyer worked in anti-money laundering, while a compliance professional learnt corporate banking.
“Global complexity is going to put more pressure on our organisations, and those [departments] that are set up in strict technical ‘verticals’, such as legal, compliance, anti-money laundering, are arguably less equipped to cope with the rate of change,” he says.
The experiment showed that a more multidisciplinary approach could help handle work more efficiently and respond to new legal or regulatory demands quicker. The pilot is being extended to 80 of the nearly 300 legal and compliance team members in Singapore.
Attempts to ensure lawyers are more versatile run counter to some recent developments in the legal sector. As global business and legal frameworks have grown more complex, corporate lawyers have increasingly specialised in narrower fields — mirroring similar trends in professions such as medicine and science. But Lam argues that more in-house lawyers will need to retain a generalist’s view across a broad range of legal issues, risks and business strategy.
He draws an analogy with the medical profession: “The world needs relatively fewer ‘neurosurgeons’,” he argues, but it “needs a ton of really, really good general practitioners [family physicians]”.
The winner of the most innovative legal team in the Innovative Lawyers Asia-Pacific awards this year is HSBC. The global bank’s lawyers have helped launch a number of “firsts” in the field of tokenised bonds and other digital assets in Hong Kong and elsewhere.
It too is investing in broadening its lawyers’ skills and experience through a job swap programme that gives the lawyers experience of working in other departments at the bank.
Top 10 innovative in-house legal teams: Asia-Pacific 2025
Winner: HSBC*
Agoda
Asian Development Bank
BHP
DBS Bank
Hang Seng Bank
IAG
SoftBank Group
UBS
Westpac
* “Winner” of the FT Innovative Lawyers award for “Innovative in-house legal team in Asia-Pacific”. Other organisations are listed alphabetically
Working more closely with colleagues outside the legal teams is a growing theme generally among in-house lawyers.
The legal operations team at BHP, the Australian mining group, has expanded to support corporate affairs and communications. This included helping managers to improve how they manage budgets and report financial information on different categories of work, such as public affairs and media relations.
Indeed, legal operations professionals are behind many of the biggest changes inside in-house legal teams highlighted in the awards this year. Anna Golovsky, executive manager for legal operations at Australian insurance company IAG, observes a marked change compared to when she started at the company. “Six years ago, there was scepticism about new technologies,” she says. “Today, 85 per cent to 90 per cent of our legal team believes that generative AI will improve efficiency and productivity.”
But a business needs to know why investment in legal technology or reorganisation is justified, and measuring return on investment for innovation in corporate legal departments is notoriously hard. However, one area where savings are easier to track is in money spent on outside law firms, and this is often the starting point for overhauling legal operations. The IAG team has found that new AI tools are helping to accelerate that process too.
“We’ve moved from taking six months to get a view on legal spend to having real-time oversight across the business,” says Golovsky. “AI is helping us take that even further, assessing not just cost, but the quality of work.”
The writer is managing director of RSGI
The case studies below, featuring the most innovative legal teams in the Asia-Pacific region highlight examples of their work in the following areas:
Operational transformation
Digital solutions
Commercial and strategic advice
Outside counsel management
Sustainability and impact
New product and services
People and skills
All the case studies were researched, compiled and ranked by RSGI. “Winner” indicates that the organisation won an FT Innovative Lawyers Asia-Pacific award for 2025.
Read the other FT Innovative Lawyers Asia-Pacific ‘Best practice case studies’, which showcase the standout innovations made for and by people working in the legal sector:
Operational transformation
STANDOUT
BHP: Winner
Originality: 8; Leadership: 8; Impact: 9; Total: 25
The Australian mining group’s legal operations team has expanded to support corporate affairs and communications.
Lawyers helped colleagues working on external affairs to improve their annual budget processes, which saves individual budget managers within the department’s remit 15-20 hours when preparing annual financial results.
Additionally, lawyers helped develop live financial monitoring “dashboards” for different categories of work, such as public affairs and media relations covered by external affairs staff. Filterable by team and cost, these save managers up to 10 hours a month by allowing them to review their team’s financial information without needing to request data separately from the finance department.
Recruit
O: 8; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 24
The legal team at Japan’s biggest recruitment agency continued to make improvements with its privacy processes. The work builds on earlier systems put in place to prevent the danger of non-compliance with privacy codes, following a data breach at a subsidiary in 2019. To bolster the rigour of Recruit’s data collection and protection, lawyers analysed 16,000 cases accumulated over five years to pinpoint recurring issues. This helped the team create a new approvals process, estimated to have saved more than 400 hours a month in review time.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Westpac
O: 8; L: 9; I: 6; Total: 23
Lawyers at the leading Australian bank have been using AI to streamline how contracts are handled with suppliers and customers. An AI-powered system introduced in February 2024 can review contracts with suppliers using various prompts, as well as handling inquiries about preferred in-house legal procedures and policies and information about past deals. The team is also working with outside law firms to use AI to speed up customer contract review, which it says has achieved significant time savings.
Rio Tinto
O: 6; L: 7; I: 9; Total: 22
The commercial and procurement legal team, based mainly in Australia, helped develop online material and support for several pieces of software to enable the mining group’s 600-strong procurement team to handle routine legal tasks for itself.
One example is a digital handbook, which has led to more self-service among procurement staff, less reliance on outdated guidance notes, and fewer routine queries being sent to colleagues in the legal team. The systems, rolled out in July 2024, have allowed faster response times on material matters with the same number of lawyers or fewer.
Hang Seng Bank
O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22
The legal department at the HSBC-controlled Hong Kong bank advised on the creation of an AI tool to convert existing software programs into more cloud-compatible code.
The lawyers reviewed governance processes and intellectual property questions, providing the bank with its own approval framework instead of relying on its parent company. The team estimates the system cut the time needed to change the code by 50 per cent, saving the bank about $2mn.
COMMENDED
Nanyang Technological University
O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20
The Singapore university’s legal team is using a contract lifecycle management system — usually used to help manage a company’s commercial agreements — to help whistleblowers report alleged wrongdoing and misbehaviour across the university.
A whistleblower can now anonymously submit a report, which is recorded in the system, where subsequent communications are also handled.
UBS
O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20
The bank’s legal departments across the Asia-Pacific region and Europe are using an AI assistant to find files in its document management system. This has cut the time needed to pinpoint a requested document by up to 20 minutes.
Digital solutions
STANDOUT
Telstra: Winner
Originality: 9; Leadership: 8; Impact: 8; Total: 25
The legal team at the Australian telecoms group has developed a tool that captures data from emails on legal matters and organises the information — lawyers must first ensure emails are forwarded or copied to an internal email address. This has saved substantial time and eased access to advice from the company’s panel of law firms.
Westpac
O: 8; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 24
The Australian bank’s legal team has introduced a single dashboard system that provides information on the cost of legal work, productivity and summaries of matters being working on. The new system saves up to 20 hours per month previously absorbed in manually updating 10 dashboards that covered the team’s 22 practice areas.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
IAG
Originality: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23
The Australian insurer’s legal department has extended use of digital systems to improve efficiency. Recent examples include improvements to document execution and e-discovery. Many simple documents are now automatically generated and the team says it has saved more than A$150,000 ($96,000) on external e-discovery over the past year.
Jones Lang LaSalle
Originality: 7; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 22
The international property group’s Australian and New Zealand legal team created a digitised tracking system to manage the licence registration process for JLL’s property brokers across Australia’s states and New Zealand, each of which has different needs. Hundreds of licences have been reviewed, and all have been issued correctly and on time, as errors are now identified sooner.
Uber
Originality: 7; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 22
The ride-hailing group’s Asia-Pacific legal team has made improvements to its litigation processes for small claims relating to drivers and food deliveries. One example is a management system for all open matters to assess what stage each claim is at and to identify next steps. The new approach has almost doubled the number of settlements and cut spending on external counsel.
COMMENDED
Asian Development Bank
Originality: 6; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 21
ADB’s legal team worked with law firm Pinsent Masons to create a document automation platform for low-risk, high-volume contracts, eliminating drafting work for its in-house lawyers.
Citic CLSA
Originality: 6; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 19
The legal team at the Hong Kong-based investment group, a subsidiary of Chinese state-backed investment bank Citic, created a litigation management system to track progress and budget approvals, which it estimates has cut time spent managing these by at least a quarter.
Commercial and strategic advice
STANDOUT
HSBC: Winner
Originality: 9; Leadership: 8; Impact: 9; Total: 26
The bank’s legal team advised on the launch of the first multi-currency digital bond offering in February 2024, valued at a total of HK$6bn ($770mn). The Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s central securities depository, CMU, used HSBC’s Orion blockchain platform for the creation, storage and sale of two-year green bonds, which were issued in Hong Kong and US dollars, euros and Chinese renminbis.
Lawyers led the negotiations with the CMU to clarify how the tokens would be characterised under Hong Kong law.
The arrangement allowed the bonds to be issued directly on to the plaform’s private blockchain, with access to the bonds also made available via international security depositories Euroclear and Clearstream as well as CMU.
UBS
O: 8; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 24
The bank’s Asia-Pacific legal team advised on local elements of the rescue merger of Credit Suisse and UBS, which was completed in July 2024. Challenges arising from the merger included the migration of former Credit Suisse clients on to UBS platforms and the continuing integration of other banking operations in areas where UBS did not have a previous presence.
Credit Suisse had been present in 18 regions in the Asia-Pacific region, compared to UBS’s 13. So the team was tasked with creating new legal entities and securing the necessary licences to facilitate the merger locally, dealing with different legal and regulatory requirements in these territories.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Asian Development Bank
O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23
The legal team of the development body worked alongside the World Bank to improve their collaboration on co-financed public sector projects in the Asia-Pacific region.
Their Full Mutual Reliance Framework, launched in February 2025, will allow borrowers seeking funds from both institutions to deal with a single “lead” lender, in charge of all aspects of preparation of a project. The bank predicts the new system will reduce project processing complexity, time, and transaction costs for borrowers.
DBS Bank
O: 8; L: 8; I: 6; Total: 22
The Singapore-based bank launched a cryptocurrency options trading and
structured notes service in September 2024, targeted at institutional and high-wealth investors.
The legal team worked with local regulator the Monetary Authority of Singapore to develop appropriate risk warnings for customers wanting to invest in the highly volatile cryptocurrency derivatives market. DBS says it is the first Asia-headquartered bank to offer financial products whose value is linked to leading cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum.
COMMENDED
Grampians Health
O: 7; L: 7; I; 7; Total: 21
The Australian hospital and healthcare provider’s legal team helped to develop a system to speed up patients’ requests to access their personal medical records. The system of dealing with Freedom of Information applications is now automated, which has reduced manual data entry and the risk of non-compliance with local state law.
Grampians, which covers western Victoria, received 1,170 requests in the year to 2024, an increase of 18 per cent on the previous year. The new tool has enabled it to manage rising applications without increasing headcount.
Mastercard
O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21
The card payment company’s Australia legal team advised on the launch of the first debit cards without a visible number in the region, in partnership with domestic retail bank AMP. The lawyers assisted AMP in developing the necessary technology including face and fingerprint ID to support the cards, which are designed to cut the risk of fraud and ease online banking for small business and personal banking customers.
Equinor Korea
O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20
The Norwegian energy group’s local legal and compliance team advised on securing a power-offtake offer with South Korea’s energy ministry, to support development of one of the world’s largest planned floating offshore wind farm projects to be located in the country’s waters.
Hong Kong Tourism Board
O: 6; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 19
The legal team at the Hong Kong government’s tourist agency created a data privacy guide to assist staff in launching digital services using personal data in 2024, including an AI travel hub.
Outside counsel management
STANDOUT
Microsoft and Eversheds Sutherland: Winners
Originality: 8; Leadership: 8; Impact: 8; Total: 24
The US tech group worked with law firm Eversheds Sutherland to create a new system for managing high-volume commercial legal requests in the Asia-Pacific region, including non-disclosure agreements, requests for proposals and marketing queries.
Microsoft’s lawyers and the law firm created guides for handling such requests and created a form for initial processing and next steps. More than 15,000 Microsoft staff can access the system and send requests directly to the firm. In the 12 months since launch, the team estimates that more than 500 requests have been dealt with in this way, saving more than 1,000 hours of in-house lawyer time. The team is now training artificial intelligence agents on the guides to make further efficiency gains.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
IAG
O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23
The Australian insurer’s legal operations team is developing qualitative guidelines to review law firm invoices based on the size, complexity and outcome of the legal work. The team analysed old invoices using AI to develop the guidelines. A “proof of concept” trial using these guidelines to review live invoices showed that savings of 10 per cent to 15 per cent were possible. The result is now being piloted with six law firms.
Equinix
O: 7; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 22
The US-based data centre company’s legal team is working with tech companies and a non-law firm provider of legal services to cut its external legal costs.
A new invoice review programme, a survey of law firms’ rates, and new policies and digital tools to help select firms have saved millions of dollars over the past year or so, the team estimates.
COMMENDED
BHP
O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21
The legal team of the world’s largest mining company has created a tool to search the work history of its panel of law firms at a glance, allowing the Australian group to negotiate more favourable rates.
Sustainability and impact
STANDOUT
Asian Development Bank: Winner
Originality: 8; Leadership: 8; Impact: 8; Total: 24
The bank’s legal team advised on the financing of a sustainable aviation fuel project in Pakistan. The ADB, alongside the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, is providing $86mn in loans to domestic biofuel producer Safco Ventures to extend production into aviation fuel from organic waste such as cooking oil. The new facility in Sheikhupura, Punjab, will collect 250,000 tons of feedstock annually and convert it into sustainable aviation fuel. It is backed by UK oil major Shell, which has signed an offtake agreement.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
HSBC
O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23
HSBC’s lawyers advised Malaysian property developer LBS Bina on the creation of a sukuk, or Islamic bond, to finance building more affordable housing in the country. The bank’s legal team managed the complexity of creating the sharia-compliant “social sukuk”. The first RM200mn ($46mn) tranche of a $159mn total facility designed to back new housebuilding was issued in January 2024 at a profit rate of 5 per cent.
AS Watson
O: 6; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 22
The legal team of the health and beauty retailer fully implemented a new supplier screening platform last year to assess the ethical behaviour, environmental, social and governance performance, and social media approach of its business partners. A few thousand suppliers so far have been screened using these tools, which enable the company to make more informed decisions on maintaining or ending relationships. The group operates about 16,500 stores, primarily across Asia and Europe, including the Watsons and Superdrug chains.
COMMENDED
SoftBank
O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20
The Japanese tech group’s legal team rolled out a detailed and extensive scoring system in 2024 to quantify non-financial risks, including environmental, social and governance questions, in its portfolio companies. The methodology has been used to assess more than 170 deals so far.
New products and services
STANDOUT
HSBC: Winner
Originality: 8; Leadership: 8; Impact: 8; Total: 24
The bank’s Asia-Pacific legal team advised on 2024’s launch of its HSBC Gold Token, a service that allows retail investors to buy fractional amounts of the precious metal through an online platform and mobile app. The product relies on the bank’s private digital assets platform, which uses blockchain technology to establish and transfer ownership of gold that is held remotely.
Although the market for tokenised and other crypto gold assets is well developed — HSBC launched a similar product for institutional investors in London in 2023 — it is the first time a tokenised gold product has been made available to retail investors in Hong Kong. Between March 2024 and May 2025, over 64,000 trades have been made on the platform.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing
O: 7; L: 7; I: 9; Total: 23
The stock exchange operator’s legal team has created a way for foreign investors to trade China Government Bonds (CGBs) and use them as collateral in international markets. The lawyers worked with Chinese regulators to gain approval for the project.
Because CGBs are non-transferable without a sale, the exchange’s clearing subsidiary was appointed as the bonds’ custodian to enable a title-transfer arrangement. This helps global banks comply with Hong Kong’s derivative clearance rules, reduces their dependence on cash collateral, and further aligns China’s bond market with international standards.
Hang Seng Bank
O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23
Legal staff at the Hong Kong bank, controlled by HSBC, advised on the design and regulatory compliance of a digital secondary trading platform for retail investors, launched in October 2024. Some 300 bonds can be traded, and execution time for securing an order has been reduced from 45 minutes to 15 minutes, according to the bank.
StraitsX
O: 7; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 22
Lawyers at fintech StraitsX, part of the Fazz Financial Group, advised on creating a scan-and-pay feature that works with different digital wallets. GrabPay and Alipay, the two most commonly used such wallets in Singapore, are using the blockchain-based service, which improves interoperability of using different digital wallets for shoppers and store owners in the city-state.
COMMENDED
Agoda
O: 6; L: 8; I; 7; Total: 21
The online travel agency, sister company to Booking.com, launched a system that allows customers to use virtual credit cards to pay airlines for flights. In-house lawyers overcame legal, regulatory and practical hurdles, such as systems protecting against potential overcharging and transaction failures. The new system enables airlines to receive payment faster than with traditional bank transfers.
UBS
O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21
The bank’s Asia-Pacific legal department advised on the launch in November of UBS Asset Management’s first tokenised fund in Singapore. Lawyers worked with regulators to ensure the fund complied with the country’s evolving legislation and regulations on investment products using distributed ledger technology.
Uber
O: 8; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 21
The ride-hailing group’s Asia-Pacific in-house lawyers advised on the launch of a pioneering autonomous robot food delivery service in Japan — a task that required them to navigate laws governing autonomous robots on public roads and those relating to food safety.
People and skills
STANDOUT
DBS Bank: Winner
Originality: 9; Leadership: 8; Impact: 8; Total: 25
Singapore’s biggest bank by assets has embarked on a programme to create a more integrated legal and compliance team. It aims to create a multi-skilled, cross-disciplinary department to provide more flexible and responsive support across its business, which operates across south-east Asia and beyond. Its Project Alpha initiative has included a three-month pilot scheme that deployed generative artificial intelligence to help staff handle litigation, work on investment products, and advise on cross-border regulatory compliance.
Initial analysis of the new approach revealed efficiency gains of up to 10 per cent and greater flexibility in resource allocation without any disruption to core operations, the bank reports. This has prompted DBS to expand the initiative’s team from four to 80 over the next year.
Agoda
O: 8; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 24
The legal department worked with the online travel agency’s chief technology officer to identify ways of using company-wide AI tools for legal tasks. This cross-functional team also created another group to explore the use of legal-focused generative AI for contract review, in which it suggests changes to the clauses. As a result, the legal department says it has substantially increased its use of generative AI and achieved efficiency gains of between 10 per cent and 30 per cent in some tasks.
SoftBank
O: 8; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 24
The Japanese tech group’s legal team is working with outside organisations to enhance its lawyers’ AI skills. Opportunities include short business school courses and group training sessions with tech company OpenAI, in which SoftBank recently led a $40bn funding round.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Nanyang Technological University
O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23
The legal team at the Singaporean university encourages and funds staff to obtain professional qualifications in various non-legal fields. In the past year, two-thirds have pursued training on topics such as career coaching and process improvement.
HSBC
O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22
The bank’s legal team has launched initiatives to give staff new work opportunities. Lawyers can swap roles with colleagues in other teams within the department and can continue assisting on projects once the placement is finished.
COMMENDED
Dentsu
O: 7; L: 8; I: 6; Total: 21
The legal team at the Japan-led global advertising group introduced biweekly meetings of around 20 people to foster original thinking. They discuss case studies based on real issues faced by the in-house lawyers, such as privacy questions around using drones at an event.
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