Over the past two years, one shift has come up again and again in conversations with legal teams across the region: the APAC general counsel role is quietly disappearing.
Usually not in one dramatic move. More often the role gets split into Southeast Asia and North Asia. Sometimes it gets absorbed into a global structure with dotted lines back to headquarters.
And to be fair, some of the logic makes sense. Closer proximity to the business. More local expertise. Lower cost.
To be fair, some of it works
Some of these models genuinely do work.
I’ve placed lawyers into country and cluster roles that worked better than the regional structure they replaced. A dedicated country counsel for China or Japan can absolutely add value that a broader APAC role sometimes can’t. When legal structures mirror the business more closely, advice is often faster and more commercially grounded.
The question isn’t whether distributed models can work.
It’s whether organisations fully understand what they’re giving up in the process.
The bit companies underestimate
What I think companies underestimate is the coordination piece. You don’t really notice it until it’s missing.
A lawyer I spoke with recently described a situation that unfolded gradually after a regional restructure. The APAC country counsels were all in regular contact – group calls, shared updates, the usual. But when the business decided to consolidate customer data onto a single regional platform, problems started surfacing.
Every jurisdiction was technically compliant, but each market had implemented its privacy framework differently. One relied on consent mechanisms, another on contractual clauses, another on standards that had since been updated. Individually, the decisions all made sense. Regionally, they no longer fit together.
The lawyers were speaking to each other. Nobody owned just stepping back and asking: “Does this actually work regionally?”
By the time someone did, the rebuild was significant and the platform rollout slipped by almost a year. The business saw it as a legal failure. The lawyers saw it as a structural one.
I keep hearing versions of this problem.
When the regional picture disappears
Risk thresholds also start drifting over time. One market escalates issues early while another manages similar issues locally. Different approaches develop quietly across the region, often without anybody really spotting it until something goes wrong.
And then there’s the bigger issue: who actually speaks for APAC?
In organisations without a regional GC, headquarters often receives input from multiple jurisdictions, each locally valid and commercially sensible, but without somebody pulling it together into a regional view.
Over time, APAC starts losing influence without anyone really intending for that to happen.
By the time global leadership notices the region isn’t being heard clearly, the structural reasons have usually been in place for years.
The leadership gap nobody talks about
Another thing I’ve noticed is the assumption that country and cluster counsel will naturally step up when the APAC GC disappears.
Many absolutely do. But regional leadership is a different skillset from being an excellent local lawyer. It requires synthesising issues across markets, pushing back on global assumptions and speaking to senior leadership in a way that represents the region as a whole.
A candidate I spoke with recently was very candid about this. She had inherited an expanded remit after her APAC GC left but admitted she didn’t yet feel ready to be “the voice of the region” to headquarters.
“I know my market,” she told me. “I don’t know enough about the others yet to speak for all of APAC.”
What she missed almost as much was the escalation layer. Previously, she would run difficult calls or sensitive decisions past the APAC GC before taking them upwards. Now she was figuring out in real time which issues warranted escalating to the global GC and which she should handle herself.
She’s a very capable lawyer. But she’s learning that level of regional leadership while already doing the job.
That’s not a capability issue. It’s an experience issue.
So where does this leave companies?
I’m not even convinced the distributed model is wrong. In plenty of organisations, it probably is the right structure.
But I do think some companies underestimate how much the APAC GC was quietly holding together until the role disappeared.
The need for regional alignment is still there. In a lot of companies, the structure just isn’t anymore.
And for organisations committed to a distributed model, the real question is probably this: what is replacing the function, not just the role?
Forums and reporting lines help with coordination. But the synthesising piece – the person stepping back and looking across the region as a whole – is harder to recreate than many organisations expect.
The savings are immediate.
The consequences usually show up later.
Olivia Seet is a partner at legal recruiter Major, Lindsey & Africa.
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