What are the most significant cases or transactions that you have been involved in over the past year?

IHCL has been on a growth path since the last few years. Last year, we continued to expand our network of hotels, negotiating and closing 53 hotel contracts, and striking strategic alliances. This journey of expansion continues till date, with many more new hotels getting added to the network. In addition, we have been opening around 3 new hotels every month. Our homestays under the brand Ama also continue to grow, with 61 new contracts negotiated and closed last year. Hand-in-hand with this frenetic pace of expansion, during the year we have bolstered compliance management across the network of our hotels by completely overhauling our compliance management system, implementing simplification, maker-checker-review mechanism, gap analysis and audit, with the overall objectives of ensuring compliance, mitigating risks and facilitating business assurance. With India now looking to implement a new and codified digital personal data protection regime, we have been busy preparing for the new era, mapping out data flow, identifying compliances and action points and ensuring the organisation is fully compliant as and when the government makes the new law effective. Last year, we also carried out a number of training sessions with the objective of raising legal awareness across the network, with an intent to mitigate legal risks for the organisation. In parallel, we continued to strategise and manage litigations or arbitrations for our network; in some cases taking strategic calls to settle or conclude the litigations and achieve best results for the organisation.

Based on your experience, what is the key to collaborating successfully with business partners?

The key to collaborating successfully with business partners is to understand business objectives and priorities, approaching issues with a solution-oriented mindset, and striking a balance between legal requirements and business objectives. It is extremely important to understand the business, and to appreciate its objectives and priorities. Without that, effective business-partnering is not possible. An effective inhouse counsel strives to achieve balance between business and legal requirements, helping achieve business objectives without breaking the law.

Which political, economic or regulatory changes have impacted your work the most in the past year?

With the new DPDP Act, the country is transitioning into a new era of codified law on the subject of digital personal data protection. This new law is going to have a significant impact on how the issues of data privacy and data protection are handled across industries, including the hospitality industry. In anticipation of the impending implementation of the new law, the legal team at IHCL has undertaken a project of creating a data privacy framework for the organisation, mapping out the data flow in the organisation, identifying compliance requirements under the new law, reviewing existing practices and documents to identify action points, all with the objective that we are in a state of readiness so that we are fully compliant with the law as soon as it becomes effective.

India is an economy that is rapidly growing and expected to be one of the economic powerhouses of the 21st Century. How do you see the role of GCs there changing in this environment?

As the Economy of the country continues to rapidly grow, the General Counsel will be an important stakeholder, ensuring that growth in the commercial world is in alignment with and not in derogation of the law of the land. The General Counsel will be an important guide and gate-keeper on the path of rapid growth, mitigating risks for commercial organisations, enabling them to achieve business objectives without breaching the law. As the economy progresses, laws will also change over time. New laws will bring with them new challenges. The GC will be an invaluable partner for the business to assess the new challenges and help navigate. Additionally, the GC will also be an important voice of reason on the table.