About

Formerly a Herbert Smith Freehills lawyer based out of Melbourne, Rohit Kumar joined UPL in 2010 and was made the company’s global general counsel in 2014, having successfully leveraged the corporate commercial and transactional legal expertise built up over his private practice career in an in-house setting. When discussing this, he lays out some of the key components to achieving this: ‘First and foremost, the understanding that you have to give commercially relevant legal advice and not a pure play legal advice; secondly, communication with certain key stake holders are very important; and thirdly, being updated on topics of interest at all times’. Kumar’s marshalling of the legal team, emphasis on use of new technologies in its standard operational procedures and empowering of other legal team members to take responsibility for decisions has made his team a highly versatile but cohesive unit. As such, it has had notable success of late. ‘We have worked on several large IP related litigations which were important litigations for the company’, Kumar says. ‘In terms of M&A, we recently announced the acquisition of a large US-based company for US$4.2bn’.