17 ASIAN LEGAL BUSINESS CHINA • 亚洲法律杂志-中国版 WWW.LEGALBUSINESSONLINE.COM/CHINA Julie Coletti Executive Vice President, Chief Legal and Regulatory Officer jcoletti@aligntech.com Ning Sun Vice President and Regional General Counsel, APAC nsun@aligntech.com BROUGHT TO YOU BY ALIGN Align Technology is a global medical device company that is changing lives through better smiles. Align reimagines and reinvents the way orthodontic and restorative treatment is presented and delivered to millions of people around the world through the digital workflow powered by the Invisalign® System of clear aligners, iTero™ intraoral scanners and exocad™ CAD/CAM software. Over the past 26 years, Align has helped doctors treat approximately 15.7 million patients worldwide with the Invisalign System and is driving the evolution in digital dentistry through the Align Digital Platform™. Under the belief of a better smile having the power to create a better future, Align creates digital technology and experiences to help people move forward in life. As a trusted legal guardian and strategic business partner, Align’s APAC Legal and Compliance team works proactively to provide legal advice on strategic decisions, navigate through complex risk factors and endeavors to improve process efficiency to drive continuous business and organization growth. The team is relatively lean with each team member playing a critical role to cover a broad geographic area including 18+ markets in APAC with diversities in language, culture and legal systems. While having highly capable lawyers support daily operations of each local market, the team also set up regional centers of excellence in data privacy, intellectual property and competition law, led by subject matter experts to build and manage knowledge, stay updated on legal developments and help company make sound plans and avoid risks. With the vision of becoming the most influential Legal & Compliance department in the world, the team keeps up with the new trends and builds forwarding look capabilities to explore risk-balanced solutions to achieve business objectives while adhering to high standards of compliance. In 2022, the team has delivered strong performance and achieved great results, in particular in the following areas: “Compliance is Our Core Competitive Advantage” ——Align Technology APAC Legal and Compliance Team Compliance Awareness Building and Enhancement “Compliance is our core competitive advantage.” says Julie Coletti, Align’s Executive Vice President, Chief Legal and Regulatory Officer. Bearing that in mind, our Legal & Compliance team always takes promoting and protecting our competitive advantages through compliance and risk management as our first priority and spares no efforts to drive awareness to ensure compliance in day-to-day operations. In 2022, the team conducted more than 60 comprehensive compliance trainings across the organization in APAC and produced training videos and guides around key watchouts in day-to-day business, covering topics including anti-corruption and code of ethics, confidential information protection, fair competition and responsible communications. These efforts significantly enhanced employees’ compliance awareness and also brought team recognitions from customers as a “valuable business partner” to protect them against risks. Leveling the playing field Competition is tough and not everyone is playing by rules. With limited resources, the team developed a smart holistic strategy to level the playing field. In 2022, we obtained ownership of 22 registered trademarks from trademark hijackers free of cost through strategic negotiations, and prevailed in 85 trademark opposition/invalidation cases against identical or confusingly similar marks, and quickly stopped the infringement activities of IP infringers through successful online take down actions. Also, through a combination of legal actions, we successfully stopped unfair competition acts of other non-compliant market players and obtained a good number of damages. All these efforts fully demonstrate the team’s commitment to protecting the company’s brand equity, maintaining a competitive edge, and leveling the play field through IP protection and anti-unfair competition activities. Digital Transformation Being one of the top innovative companies, Align has been proactively exploring and leading new pathways to drive digital dentistry. Legal and Compliance team works closely with business to commercialize innovative products and services, pilot new business models, build governance for and life cycle risk manage commercial programs. Team has also been actively exploring legal operations technologies to make legal work more efficient. This was inspired by Julie’s wisdom and imperative “Let’s work smarter not harder!” This year, the team has automated hundreds of contract reviews and launched an APAC-wide online portal to provide employees with easier access to legal & compliance policies, trainings, templates and empower them with self-service tools, which greatly improves work efficiency and save resources of the team to focus on more value-added work. Looking to the future, the team sees exciting opportunities in supporting Align to lead the change in the digital dentistry and embraces challenges in this fast-evolving macroenvironment. As we build compliance as a core competitive advantage for Align, we continue to be inspired by and committed to our mission of empowering business, building resilience and make meaningful impact through robust corporate governance and integrity.
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