In-house counsel with Asian technology and telecom companies are handling regulatory fragmentation and AI adoption by moving legal expertise upstream and embedding lawyers directly in product design and cross-functional teams. This approach enables them to identify risks earlier and build proportionate governance into new products, helping businesses move forward without unnecessary regulatory exposure.
Regulatory Challenges in a Fragmented Market
Audra Balasingam, general counsel, data protection officer, and company secretary at StarHub, notes that technological change has outpaced regulation. The challenge now is making decisions in an environment where regulatory expectations are still developing, ensuring these decisions remain sustainable as the market evolves.
Managing Regulatory Divergence Across Borders
Sabarrudin Taha, deputy general counsel at Lightstorm, highlights the challenge of managing how different regulatory regimes interact across a single transaction. Digital infrastructure projects often span multiple jurisdictions, involving telecommunications licensing, foreign investment approvals, customs requirements, and sector-specific regulations.
Every project presents distinct legal hurdles, demanding that legal professionals grasp operational details, predict potential conflicts, and craft solutions that satisfy regulatory demands while keeping business goals intact.
Brian Yu, senior counsel at Tencent Japan, emphasizes the divergence in regulations. A globally shipped product on a single code base must answer to a dozen different regulators once it crosses borders. The sharpest pressure comes from data and content localization, with personal data transfer rules under China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) and their evolving counterparts across Southeast Asia and Korea.
Introducing a new feature can require separate evaluations, submissions, and hosting choices in each market. Additional requirements—such as age verification, child protection measures, mandatory real-name policies, and content moderation standards—further complicate adherence to the law.
Legal departments are now participating in product development rather than just reviewing final decisions. This shift demands they understand not just laws, but also the technology, business goals, and customer impact behind key choices.
At StarHub, the emphasis is on creating practical rules that teams can consistently follow as AI advances. A risk-based strategy ensures stricter oversight for high-risk applications while allowing faster adoption of lower-risk tools. Collaboration across legal, technology, cybersecurity, data protection, and business teams is key to evaluating AI applications from all angles.
At Tencent Japan, AI is treated as a governed capability, not a feature. A cross-functional review process classifies each use case by risk and attaches proportionate controls. For customer-facing tools, priorities include transparency, output accuracy, and human escalation paths; for fraud detection, data minimization, explainability, and avoiding discriminatory outcomes are key.
Controls on training-data provenance and vendor terms are being tightened, as IP and privacy exposure often sits upstream of the model. Internal policies are written to map to emerging frameworks across Asia, ensuring governance holds up wherever a system is deployed.
While technical legal knowledge remains vital, it is no longer sufficient. Modern in-house lawyers must also be business-savvy, comfortable with uncertainty, and genuinely interested in technology. Proficiency in AI principles is becoming essential, though they don’t need engineering expertise. They must recognize AI’s capabilities, limitations, and how governance can promote responsible deployment.
Embedding lawyers close to business lines, rather than operating as a distant central function, allows counsel to spot risk early and unblock progress. Structurally, this means generalist, business-facing counsel supported by specialists in data, IP, and regulatory matters.
When hiring, commercial judgment, comfort with ambiguity, and cross-border literacy are prioritized over a fixed knowledge base. Language and cultural fluency across Asian markets, along with baseline technical curiosity, are genuine differentiators.
Evolving Role of General Counsel in Technology and Telecom
The role of general counsel in Asia’s technology, media, and telecom (TMT) sector is shifting from legal gatekeeping to strategic enabling. As technology regulation evolves, boards expect general counsel to establish governance frameworks for responsible AI deployment, with clear accountability and oversight. This involves understanding digital infrastructure, data governance, cybersecurity, cloud services, and AI to contribute meaningfully to commercial strategy.
