Loh Bee Kee, the Singapore-based GC at e-commerce giant Lazada, talks strategy shifts, perception risk and why legal ops are central to building a future-ready team
First of all, what led to your current role as GC of Lazada?
I started out as a litigator. Eventually, wanting to be in the room when the decision is made, rather than be the one who cleans up the “mess” after the dispute has occurred, I decided to become an in-house counsel. My early years in Lazada were spent building many things from scratch as the company and the e-commerce industry were still nascent. Now that both Lazada and the e-commerce industry have matured considerably, my role as General Counsel has shifted the focus to risk management and scaling the team’s operations.
You’ve mentioned before that change is constant in a tech business. What’s been keeping you and your team busiest recently?
Constant change is integral to a tech company. As part of Lazada’s constant innovation, the legal team supported a multi-year shift in the commercial strategy, which involved rethinking how products, product reviews, recommendations and sales channels were presented on the platform.
What did that mean in practice for the legal team?
A couple of years ago, we also trialled a new “Choice” product funnel, which integrates supply chain and store management into the existing e-commerce platform offering. This required the team to have broader expertise of the entire lifecycle of a product on our platform, including sourcing, promotion, sale and logistics.
So it’s not just about transactions or compliance — it’s about understanding the full commercial journey?
Exactly. The team needs to understand the entire product lifecycle in order to properly support innovation at scale.
When things are uncertain — whether internally or externally — how does your role change?
When things are in flux, it is important to be very clear about what remain the priorities and what are distractions. It is especially important that I, as well as the senior leaders in my team, help the management and other decision-makers to identify what the core issues are through the noise of uncertainty.
How do you keep your own team steady during that kind of environment?
Constant communication within the team helps the members to process what they are seeing and feeling about what’s going on in the organisation, and also to bring focus back to their core duties.
Is that more about legal judgement — or leadership?
It’s both. You need clarity of legal thinking, but you also need to create stability for others.
We can’t ignore the geopolitical backdrop at the moment. How much does that factor into your day-to-day risk assessment?
While Lazada, being in Southeast Asia, is not directly in the line of fire between the West and China, we are seeing increased impact of the geopolitical tension on our business decisions. As Lazada is part of the Alibaba Group, we are extremely mindful of how our actions may be perceived as actions of our parent group, and by extension, of a “Chinese business.”
So perception risk is now part of legal risk?
Particularly when we deal with government agencies and regulators in our region, we have recently included in our decision-making an assessment of how our actions may be perceived by the local governments and the public. We also now engage more closely with our government affairs team to jointly assess the potential impact of all major decisions.
Has that changed how early legal gets involved?
It reinforces the importance of legal and government affairs being involved at the earliest stage of strategic decisions.
Outside of the day-to-day demands of the role, what’s something you feel particularly strongly about?
I am a loud advocate of better legal operations and technology in the legal team’s work. To me, the continuity and strength of a legal team do not solely rely on the team’s ability to recruit and retain well. The team needs to be able to build on the organisation’s knowledge and lessons learned, and be able to transform these into tools that can preserve the team’s efficiency and continuity — even during periods of instability in the workforce or work capacity.
When you talk about legal operations, what does that mean in practice?
My focus on legal operations is not just adopting or developing shiny new tools. Instead, I have dedicated resources at both Lazada and Alibaba International level to examine how the team is working, identify where we are spending more time or effort than ought to be required on a task, execute (big or small) improvements to processes and tools to improve those inefficiencies, and to leverage latest technology to develop new tools to guide decision-making and daily operations.
So it’s really about building institutional resilience?
Exactly. It’s about making the legal function stronger than any one individual.
