About

Pujarini Guha Maulik, associate general counsel of pioneering Indian online advertising firm InMobi, points to the volatility of the advertising technology market and a constantly evolving legal framework when discussing the general challenges in her sector. Maulik has personally been involved in a recent settlement made by InMobi with the US Federal Trade Commission over a privacy issue. This response has manifested itself via the implementation of a new company-wide privacy program to comply with ‘the letter and the spirit’ of privacy laws. Further initiatives that Maulik has been involved in include the transformation of the legal team from what she describes as a ‘reactive’ to an ‘intuitive’ department, well organised into sub-sections based around specific expertise and business needs. Maulik’s impressive career leading up to InMobi has put her in a good place to handle these challenges. Having been an in-house lawyer for over 11 years, Maulik’s résumé up to this point features a number of prominent companies, such as a six year tenure at Infosys that included a role as second in command for the Infosys BPO legal team. When measuring her own success, Maulik refers to the intangible rather than calculable success markers inherent in legal work. She values ‘the establishment of a compelling team and systematic legal process’, above success in ‘large value deals or complex disputes’. Indeed she measures the success of her team as a whole in a pragmatic way, believing that calculating the positive effect a legal team has on a business ‘cannot be quantified by any measurable metric – be it deal value or number of transactions’. Rather, the success or failure of an in-house legal team is ‘evidenced by [the] healthy functioning of the company’ as a whole. Maulik’s experience has been recognised by industry insiders, as she has been invited to speak at a range of legal conferences on a number of occasions.