About

Being a practising lawyer in the initial years of his career, Mani Kant Mehta is able to appreciate the position of an outside counsel and able to put-in senior management’s concern as a general counsel while giving briefs. This gives him an advantage to balance between the legal as well as the commercial issues, thus giving comfort to both the sides. Mehta highlights that, ‘it is rightly said that if the input is right, then output will surely be right. It has always been my efforts to provide solutions to the management rather than being a bottleneck to the growth of an organisation and it is with this approach I have been able to earn a respect for the legal department, which generally is an ignored branch in an organisational structure in many corporates’. By following a two-step approach, Mehta has successfully made the legal department into a robust support system and ensured that there are zero leakages in fighting or defending a case. As a solution provider he says that his approach has always been to use preventive measures so as to mitigate risks and stop further harm to the interest of the organisation if a situation does occur. He says, that ‘I have tried to adopt [a way] of thinking from a commercial angle while appreciating the legal limitations. With my tone and language like a commercial person, people in my organisation started approaching legal’. In addition to promoting the legal function internally, Mehta is commended for implementing a contract management system and other standard operating procedures to maximise his department’s potential efficiency.