About

Vijay Kamath first moved in-house in 2003 when he joined Fiat India, part of the Italian car manufacturer. Having experienced significant exposure to dispute resolution, contracting, corporate advisory work and intellectual property rights at Fiat, and subsequently at engineering consultancy company Uhde India (now ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions (India) Group), Kamath joined car manufacturing giant Volkswagen in 2008. Originally head of legal and company secretary for Volkswagen Group Sales India, his role was extended in 2011 to cover governance, risk and compliance. As part of the Volkswagen Group, the company sells Audi, Porsche, Volkswagen and Škoda vehicles in India. After building his team of six from scratch, Kamath has fostered high levels of efficiency in the team by streamlining internal processes, creating contract templates, encouraging the use of reporting and contracting management systems among other things. His work has been replicated in the group’s other companies and has helped shifted perceptions of the legal department in the company. ‘Legal is involved with the business teams right at the beginning, rather than at the end, of the projects. We are an integral part of business strategies and the combined expertise in legal, compliance and risk only adds to the value’, Kamath says. Recent work he has been involved in includes a successful defence of a criminal case filed by a local dealer against Volkswagen’s senior management. After gaining a favourable result, other companies in the industry have sought to replicate the approach to solving disputes that are common in the industry. Kamath says ‘lawyers should get out of their conventional approach of advising merely as lawyers, but should contribute in giving commercial solutions and at the same time working well within the compliance and legislative framework’.