On 15 June 2022 we had the great pleasure of welcoming our community to the In-House Community Counsel of the Year Awards, recognising the standout efforts in-house teams and counsel made in 2021, with special mention given to external counsel that, too, left a mark. We once again met live on Zoom, as has come to be the “new normal” given the prevailing pandemic. This allowed us to have in attendance 90+ representatives of both in-house and private practice from Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, UAE, Australia, South Korea, India, UK, South Africa, and Canada – a truly global event, albeit remote!
We received a record 160 nominations and submissions for these awards from which 51 teams were short-listed for various In-House Industry award categories, including:
| Aviation | Banking | Conglomerate |
| Energy & Natural Resources | Financial Services – ex-banking | FMCG |
| Insurance | Life Science & Pharma | Manufacturing & Engineering |
| Property, Infrastructure & Logistics | Retail & Healthcare | Technology, Media & Telecoms |
| Travel & Leisure |
Further award categories for In-House Best Practice Teams, as well as IHC Teams of the Year, included:
| Change Management | Corporate Social Responsibility | Compliance |
| Diversity | Innovation | Integration |
| Technology Integration | Transactional | Small Team |
Many law firms and other legal service providers made equally impressive submissions for our judges to consider in both the non-law firm and law firm categories of the Visionary Client Services award. We further had 19 exceptional candidates shortlisted for the main award of the event, being the In-House Counsel of the Year, 2021.
Our esteemed panel of judges with the unenviable task of picking winners from these submissions included Fengwen Jiang, Mitch Kowalski, Nick Seddon, Clinton Swan, Yosr Hamzah and Carina Wessels (former three being the judges for In-House Teams of the Year). It was our honour to have their input and we extend, once again, our warmest thanks to them.
The awards were hosted by In-House Community publisher, Rahul Prakash, with award winners announced with the gracious help of speakers Tim Gilkison, who founded In-House Community back in 1998 and who is currently the business development manager at Praxonomy (a cloud-based secure board portal); Nick Seddon, director of Seddon and Co and former Asia Managing Partner of Eversheds Sutherland and DLA Piper; Fengwen Jiang, a legal force with 25 years of in-house legal experience at top Fortune 500 US and EU companies, as well as private practice and legal tech experience; and, finally, Mitch Kowalski, a globally-recognised thought leader on the changing legal services ecosystem, having both in-house and private practice experience, and the author of two critically acclaimed books in this area. Mitch spoke at our very first Legal Inno’Tech Forum in Hong Kong and it was great to have him back with us.
It was our pleasure to once again be supporting HandsOn Hong Kong this year, a charitable organisation with the mission of “empowering everyone in Hong Kong to volunteer”. HandsOn Hong Kong runs 200 programs a month, supporting more than 100 grassroots charities and providing upwards of 16,000 volunteer opportunities! Catherine Dannaoui, Deputy Executive Director of HandsOn Hong Kong, joined us to introduce her organisation and kindly announce a further tranche of winning participants in our awards.
All the winners of the In-House Community Counsel of the Year Awards, 2021, together with further insights into the work that won them recognition, will be announced in the upcoming issue of IHC eMagazine upcoming up in end of June 2022.