About

Rajneesh Jaswal, head of legal and compliance for the seven-person in-house legal team at the Indian arm of global self-service wholesale titan METRO Cash and Carry, aptly describes the advancements that the team has been at the head of over recent years. ‘METRO and the legal team itself have seen significant changes in the last two years’, he recalls. ‘Not only is the company helmed by a new management team, the legal team itself is newly formed and is supporting a rapidly evolving business and regulatory environment while at the same time finding its roots within METRO’. Enjoying a high degree of coordination in its efforts, Jaswal is keen to comment that ‘the team considers itself as a single unit with everyone contributing equally’, and is ‘a tightly-knit unit which is actively embedded in the business. This ethos’, he explains, ‘has evolved as a result of the necessity of meeting business goals and the peculiar situation of almost everyone in the team being new. As such, team members do not hesitate to assist other members in a project, and goals and priorities are jointly decided’. Jaswal has managed to nurture this new team highly effectively, and could not be more pleased with the results: ‘From my perspective as the head of the department, it is a pleasure to see individual members come together to deliver results and create a robust trust bank. In a very short space of time, the team has impacted the business positively and built a reputation as a trusted adviser’. On a day-to-day basis the team addresses issues ranging from consumer laws, civil litigation, criminal action, competition law, labour matters including union issues, anti-trust, FDI, large ticket real estate and many others. ’If mapped to law firm practice areas, we address almost everything in contentious and non-contentious domains except M&A and IPR. It is a source of pride to see team members maturing into fearless and solution-minded lawyers advising management on operations spread over 24 stores in nine states’ adds Jaswal.