About

Nitin Mittal currently heads the legal and compliance team for Philips Lighting India in the Indian subcontinent with responsibilities including corporate legal advisory, litigation, corporate governance and compliance. Prior to Philips Lighting, Mittal had a ten-year stint at OSRAM India, where he was head of legal, compliance and company secretary. Over the last 16 years, Mittal has handled a range functions while leading teams on M&A restructurings, the integration of acquired companies, civil and criminal litigations and high-stake arbitrations. He has also set up new plants, established contract management processes, implemented compliance programs and managed complex projects with regional and global implications. When creating the legal team from scratch, Mittal took the initiative to also leverage technology to digitise legal and business tasks. Some of the technology Mittal implemented was a contract management tool, a compliance management system, and a board process management tool. Demonstrating his value to the company, Mittal has been prominent in Philip’s expansion into Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, the resolution of a real estate stamp duty title dispute which was in abeyance for around a decade, as well as the assistance on several multi-million dollar deals. Working with the internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) team, he has also helped devise and implement the company CSR plan wherein the company strives to change lives through making people aware on energy efficiency, innovative lighting solutions, empowering rural women and also enhancing sports development in the country. He says that, ‘the role of a corporate counsel is to give strategic and corrective direction to the company to ensure that all legal and compliance risks are adequately addressed. The idea is not only to safeguard the company and its reputation, but also to ring-fence it from all possible litigation and non-compliance issues. A corporate counsel is the company’s conscience-keeper’.