Currently, my role is the Head – Legal, Compliance and Secretarial (designated as Director – Legal & General Counsel India, part of leadership team) with Senvion Wind Technology Pvt. Ltd., a Senvion group company headquartered in Germany. Senvion globally deals in design, manufacture, installation, operation and management of wind turbines – We make wind perform.
This is a new industry for me where each day is a new learning. This is giving me exposure into a not so familiar space and opportunity to learn many issues from scratch. The responsibility of being a part of leadership team is that one cannot confine himself to his role alone. Similarly, I am a part of entire strategy and policy framework for Senvion in India. This helps me hone my managerial & leadership skills too.
So the mandates I handle include advising and strategizing on all transactions, policies, compliances, disputes, applicability of various laws across the organisation in order to ensure that the business is carried out while keeping a check on legal and commercial risks. I also advise Board and other stakeholders on their various duties and responsibilities.
I am a first-generation lawyer in the family full of accountants. In fact, I aspired to be a doctor throughout my life at school and therefore I did my XII in Science stream with Biology. However, as they say, future is uncertain and it surely was no different for me. It, thus, will not be wrong to say that I became a lawyer by chance.
I dropped a year after my XII preparing for my medical entrances, but had to miss out on few most critical medical entrance exams for Delhi students, due to severe bout of chicken pox. I did not know what to do next since I did not have the courage to waste any more time of my life to prepare for my medical entrances, and belonging to a very humble lower middleclass family, there was no money to be spent on steep capitation fee for my admission in a private medical college, which some of my friends from affluent families could afford.
Thanks to the Institute of Company Secretaries of India for launching its foundation course right then and I seized that opportunity with both hands. Belonging to a family of accountants, I didn’t find it difficult to change streams and thus I enrolled for bachelors of commerce. Rest, as they say, is history and a pleasant one at that. And this episode of my life helped me become stronger in life to face any untoward or unaccepted situations. Grit and determination can help you fight any such situations. Since then, I have not let my chips down in any adverse circumstance. I always believed in myself and life has been kind to me.
The journey in the profession has been quite eventful. After working for a leading law firm of those times for little over a year, I got my first opportunity to work with a French multi-national as its company secretary and I jumped on to it with ecstasy. To my good luck (that I did not respect then), there was no in-house counsel and I was expected to double up to do that role since I was the only qualified lawyer on the rolls of the company. That flavour of exposure in international contracts, M&A and joint venture transactions, etc really opened my mind up and I started to think like a lawyer. That is where I developed my interest in exploring law and shifting my focus to law as my main profession which helped me shape my professional career.
After working for around 5 years with the French MNC, I joined a start-up law firm where I worked for around 4 years and honed my skills on varied domestic and international transactions in various industries – from joint ventures to project financing, from M&A to real estate, from private equity investments to developing SEZs.
After this, in 2010 I joined InterGlobe Hotels (InterGlobe – Accor JV), company engaged in the development of Accor brand Hotels in India as its Head – Legal, Secretarial & Estate Management for. This gave me exposure into a not so familiar space for me so it was a learning from scratch on many issues. This is where my journey as General Counsel started. Within a couple of years, I was included as part of the leadership team of InterGlobe Hotels. This helped me sharpen my managerial & leadership skills – and learnings in commercial, finance, construction, HR space.
After InterGlobe Hotels, I had a very short stint as Head – Legal, Secretarial & Compliance with Azure Power (a NYSE listed India solar power developer) after which I made a move back to law firm in a senior role when I joined Hammurabi & Solomon Partners as Senior Partner. However, soon I started to miss my inhouse role. After having spent most of my life as inhouse counsel, I realised that it is a personal choice and for me, I derived sense of satisfaction and kick by being a part of the business and ensuring that my advices and strategies were being implemented, and the benefits those were bringing to my organisation. And thus I decided to return inhouse and joined Senvion in India.
The role of in-house counsel has really evolved in India over last decade or so. When I did my law in 1999, even large corporations in India depended on external counsels to advise on a trivial issue to large transactions. Now, corporations have learnt the importance of strong in house legal departments. In-house counsels have also understood that they cannot remain only the legal advisors, but they need to have commercial acumen and need to understand the business, so that they can be seen as business enablers and they can help business grow with their advice while ensuring that the business remains on right side of law and risks are mitigated to the extent possible.
In view of the above, the role of an inhouse counsel and as external counsel has not remained very different now in its reach and scope, and it converges at a point of providing quality and timely delivery in the best interest of the client.
The major difference being that in-house counsels have all departments of the corporations as their internal clients, while for external counsels, they have corporations as their external clients.
A General Counsel is expected to be a master of the Industry he is working for at that point of time. He is expected to know everything that is happening around in the industry, while at the same time he has to be jack of all. It is therefore, very important to keep an open mind and keep learning throughout our lives.
A General Counsel has to, at the same time, keep himself abreast with fast changing law to ensure that his organization is always on the right side of law and legal risks in any transactions are mitigated to the extent possible, while ensuring that his advice is commercially savvy and business enabler that helps the business move forward, than being a show stopper. He also needs to be a strategic leader who is always available for advising across functions and departments right from finance, commercial, human resource, marketing, up to the Board and other stakeholders.
Additionally, fast changing regulatory and technology regime ensures that there is absolutely no time to relax. So, the word of caution here is, one cannot afford to be lax at any point of time in life. We should always put in our best and should challenge ourselves at each step to achieve more.
At the same time, the working with constant challenge of tightening on costs while ensuring optimal and efficient delivery is the key to a successful General Counsel.
As I said before, the role of an in-house counsel and external counsel converges at a point of providing quality and timely delivery in the best interest of the client. Therefore, it becomes even more important for law firms to find innovative ideas and provide out of the box advises to in-house legal teams on various aspects of the transactions.
In addition to having knowledge and experience of the industry, the law firms also need to spend time and make effort to understand the businesses of particular clients they are catering to. This will help them understand how the business works as well as the business needs and ask. There are no short cuts to this.
Considering the strong in-house legal teams that many organisations are opting for, law firms need to keep finding ways to add value to the business of their clients. As they say, this is an era of specialization. More so for law firms in this era of strong in-house counsels. Therefore, it is advisable to be a specialist and master in your field, so that law firms can provide swift advise efficiently. In-house legal teams shall always need external counsels to advise, as long as they can provide the value adds that General Counsels need.
There is no substitute to hard work, learning and gaining knowledge. One must always be keen to learn and curious to know more. It is very important for a lawyer to understand the needs of its clients – both internal and external.
Therefore, it is important for a lawyer to understand in depth the business of its clients so that his advice is always in the commercial interest of his clients.
The basic principles that we always learn right from primary school to the highest educational institutions is all what is needed to develop any skills and those principles cannot be replaced. These include hard work, dedication, grit, determination, sincerity, honesty of purpose, belief in oneself, commitment, etc. These sound like yet another motivational speech, but trust me there is no substitute for this and one who has these can achieve any heights and can develop any skill he/she desires.
As I say, learning is a virtue. Thus, more the education and learning, more the knowledge; more the knowledge, more the intelligence. One should always study as much as one can. General studies help one gain general knowledge about all subjects, which helps you in deciding what subject interests you more. Higher studies then would help you understand and know more about the subject that interests you more.
I always try to emphasize to budding lawyers the importance of having some exposure to litigation in the initial years – even when you eventually want to pursue your career as inhouse counsel. This really opens up the mind and helps understand how to research and find right judgments and also gives a good understanding of how a law or provision of contract is interpreted. This also helps you understand the processes of various courts and quasi-judicial authorities. I really missed out on these learnings in the initial stages of my career, and thus I had to put in an overdose of extra efforts to learn few of those nuances. One always have to learn these the hard way, so better we learn initially in our career. Most importantly, it helps to keep our ego and attitude under check.
Favourite Gadget – My mobile phone
Favourite App – Whatsapp
Favourite Automobile Brand – Honda City
Favourite Writing Instrument – Pencil
Favourite Holiday Destination – Goa
Favourite Cuisine – Nalli Nihari
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