With Marty Chao, Senior Corporate Counsel at SHEIN Distribution Corporation
SHEIN partners with Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker to strengthen global legal operations
Supporting global growth through better legal governance and visibility
Overview
As one of China's most successful global e-commerce companies, SHEIN has expanded its business across multiple countries and jurisdictions worldwide. As the company continues to scale internationally, managing legal operations has become increasingly complex.
Beyond addressing legal and regulatory requirements across different markets, the legal team must maintain visibility over legal matters, outside counsel relationships, and legal spend while supporting finance, audit, and business stakeholders with accurate and timely information.
For a company operating at global scale, establishing a modern, data-driven legal operations framework has become a critical component of corporate governance and sustainable growth.
The challenge
Sharing global legal operations best practices at a Thomson Reuters webinar
At a recent Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker customer webinar, Marty Chao, Senior Corporate Counsel, Legal Operations at SHEIN, joined as a guest speaker to share how the company has evolved its legal operations capabilities to support rapid international expansion.
During the session, Marty discussed the challenges many fast-growing multinational organisations face when managing legal matters, outside counsel, and legal spend through disconnected systems, spreadsheets, and email-based workflows.
As business complexity increases, legal teams require greater visibility, governance, and operational consistency to effectively support global business objectives.
“As our business continues to expand globally, we need a more systematic approach to managing legal operations. Through our partnership with Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker, we've gained greater visibility, stronger operational processes, and better access to data that helps our legal team support the business at scale.”
Marty Chao
Senior Corporate Counsel, Legal Ops, SHEIN Distribution Corporation
The solution
Partnering with Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker to drive legal operations transformation
To support its growing global footprint, SHEIN partnered with Thomson Reuters and implemented Legal Tracker as its legal operations and legal spend management platform.
The platform provides a centralised framework for managing legal matters, outside counsel relationships, invoices, and legal spend across regions.
Through Legal Tracker, SHEIN has been able to:
- Centralise legal matter and outside counsel management
- Improve visibility into legal spend and budgeting
- Standardise invoice review and approval processes
- Strengthen billing governance and rate management
- Enhance audit readiness and reporting capabilities
By consolidating legal operations data into a single platform, the legal team can access more consistent, reliable, and actionable information to support business decision-making.
The outcome
Building transparency and governance at global scale
One of the key themes highlighted during the webinar was the importance of transparency.
According to Marty, Legal Tracker has helped SHEIN establish a more structured and visible approach to legal operations. Information that previously required significant manual effort to compile from emails and spreadsheets can now be accessed through a centralised system.
This enables the legal team to better support internal audits, provide stronger reporting to finance and management stakeholders, and gain greater insight into legal spend and operational performance.
For global organisations operating across multiple jurisdictions, these capabilities help create stronger governance, improved accountability, and more scalable legal operations.
Laying the foundation for AI-driven legal operations
For SHEIN, digital transformation is not solely about automation—it is about building a strong data foundation for the future. Marty emphasised that successful AI adoption depends on having structured, accurate, and consistent legal operations data.
By centralising legal spend and operational data through Legal Tracker, SHEIN has established the foundation needed to explore future AI-enabled capabilities, including:
- Invoice review automation
- Legal spend analysis
- Outside counsel performance insights
- Budget forecasting and trend analysis
As AI continues to evolve, the company sees significant opportunities to move beyond individual invoice reviews and toward more strategic, data-driven legal decision-making.
At a glance
Industry
E-commerce / fast-fashion retail
Headquarters
Singapore
Solutions
Legal
(Legal Tracker)
Year founded
2008
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