About

Atul Gopalkrishna Juvle joined Schindler India in July 2014 with over 30 years of experience including 18 years as a general counsel, and has achieved great successes during his time at the company. Leading a young vibrant team of eight qualified lawyers covering contract, commercial, compliance, legal, code of conduct and company secretarial responsibilities. Juvle and his team have assisted in the growth of the business by 30% during Juvle’s tenure. The team has won almost all litigations, with the remainder still active and have not been issued any compliance related fines in two years. The team also recently successfully concluded one critical IP action recently which was a major success in 2018. Juvle has introduced several cultural changes in the legal department, adapting the philosophy of the legal team from “No to Know and Go”. He identifies that, ‘initially we were believing only in risk identification so the business was sceptical in referring matters to us. This was changed and now there are improvements [on a yearly] basis. Now no one is afraid to connect as the business has the confidence that solutions will come with problems’. A second cultural change successfully introduced in the department is the concept of having zero lead time in advance of problems. Juvle says that ‘the legal department is like a family doctor and hence can’t work on a concept of lead time. The response has to be within one day or interim response with an exact date of final response’. He also supports his team by organising training every six months helping them with their career and keeping his team up to date. These cultural changes have led to the team excelling in productivity demonstrated by the quantity of deals and successful projects. For example, the team worked to get clearance to set up a factory in Chakan putting it into commercial production. With such achievements under his belt, it is no surprise that nominators were keen to highlight Juvle’s credentials as a top in-house lawyer during this year’s research.