About

As the general counsel of multinational consultancy firm EY’s Indian and Bangladeshi operations, since September 2012 Amar Sundram is involved in all major and critical decision making which can have an impact on the sustenance and growth of the organisation from a regulatory, compliance and legal perspective. Sundram describes the changes he’s made to the legal function during his time at EY India and the positive impact this has had on the business: ‘When I joined the current organisation, it was a small team of just two in-house junior lawyers and after six years of my journey with EY, today we are 12 lawyers and growing. We are handling approximately 15,000 employees [across] India including approximately 400 partners. The biggest professional satisfaction that I draw is the fact that the employees treat the entire members of the legal department as their trusted and reliable advisors for all their business – legal problems. They don’t hesitate to come to us, at the first instance of a problem, fully confident that they [will] get a solution. Instilling this confidence in a large work force required a collaborative approach, inspiring trust through integrity and dependability and today, with pride, I can say that my legal team have delivered on the promises. It was equally important, as a leader of the team, to keep the team charged, energised with complete legal updates and knowledge. Today, almost all of our legal work is handled in-house with [much] less dependency on external counsel’. The overall impact of the above changes overseen by Sundram has been almost negligible litigation, full compliance with ethical practices and zero tolerance towards breaches, clear successes for such a vast organisation as EY.