About

In over 25 years of corporate in-house experience, P M Devaiah has worked at some of India’s largest and most succesful companies including Tata Projects, Hindustan Unilever, Bio Products Laboratory, Carlyle Group and ICICI Venture. During this time he has gained exposure to a wide range of practices such as joint ventures, private equity deals, shareholders agreements, high stakes litigation, M&A transactions, international arbitration, vendor contracts, technology transfer arrangements, intellectual property matters and comprehensive legal due diligence. Having held both head of legal and general counsel positions in the past, Devaiah joined Everstone Capital, a private equity, real estate and financial services company with $3.3bn of assets under management, as partner and general counsel in 2007. Part of the senior management team and partnership committee and with eight direct reports, Devaiah’s role covers the legal, secretarial and compliance functions of the firm. Key features of his tenure at Everstone have been transforming the legal department into an ‘in-house law firm’, training the team to be ‘completely business like’ and positioning them as an integral part of the company delivering high quality services and added-value to the business teams. In dealing with the evolving regulatory framework, Devaiah says ‘our own long experience, preventive planning, access to best advisors, talents and public place relationships supported by our own strong and robust adherence to good governance and legal regime are all some of the methods in which we overcome such challenges’. In his spare time Devaiah enjoys writing legal articles and has had work published on civil dispute practices, regulatory reform and Indian business.