About

Over the last 20 years, Sujeet Jain has mainly worked with three organisations. From 1998 to 2003 he worked with Hutchison Telecom India (now Vodafone India) as senior manager legal and company secretary. From 2005 to 2007 he worked with People Group as vice president legal and corporate affairs where he was a part of the leadership team and played various senior management roles. Jain joined Viacom18 (V18) in 2008 as head of legal and currently is group general counsel and part of the leadership team. At Viacom18, he was the first lawyer and had set up 55 member team from the scratch which has since been consistently rewarded in the industry as one of the best in-house teams in India. V18 has grown from a single business to multiple businesses and has grown exponentially in the last 10 years, and Jain has been part of that journey from inception as a leadership team member. Jain structured his legal department in line with the high-growth nature of our businesses and aligned it to the overall organisation structure. He has also incorporated a centre of excellence model within the structure of legal department so that it can minimise dependence on external counsel. There are five critical clusters within the legal department with each one headed by a senior lawyer. This has enabled the department to not only add value for every aspect of business but also enabled faster delivery without compromising quality. In the last year, the V18 legal team has been busy with matters relating to the release of the company’s film Padmaavat, which suffered lots of controversy. Jain explains that, despite the CBFC certification, the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana issued statutory prohibition orders against the exhibition of the film even before the release date of the film was announced. ‘Viacom18 challenged such prohibitions by filing petitions against all these states before the Supreme Court of India claiming the prohibitions to be not only in violation of the fundamental right of free speech and expression granted to the producers and the viewers of the film as citizens of India but also an assault to the very federal structure of the country where the states were disobeying the clearance granted to the film by the CBFC, a statutory authority established under the central laws of India. In our opinion this was the most publicised legal case in the history of Indian cinema’. The Supreme Court, in a landmark judgement, declared the prohibition imposed by states on the release of the film as unconstitutional. This was a major victory for the team and for Jain personally as it represents an important change in the Bollywood industry.