Team size:    25 

Can you tell us a little about your significant accomplishments over the last few years, as a team or by yourself?    

In 2022 HDFC Life successfully acquired Exide Life Insurance in a Rs. 6687 — crores $USD835m transaction — one of the most significant and first-ever M&A transactions in the life insurance space in India. The entire acquisition process was done at a fast pace in 4-5 months during the peak of the second Covid wave, with the legal team involved in executing the M&A strategy, which involved undertaking legal due diligence, contractual documentation and negotiations; working on the application process for obtaining various regulatory approvals from Competition Commission of India (CCI), the Stock Exchanges- NSE & BSE and IRDAI.    

HDFC Life, one of India’s largest listed private life insurers, had to ensure that the entire transaction was quick, seamless and delivered efficiently to ensure value preservation in the deal. Since insurance is a very tightly regulated sector in India and this transaction involved acquiring 4000 plus employees and lakhs of policyholders, it required the legal team to be very agile and strategic in providing legal advice and developing risk mitigation strategies in managing various sensitive elements. The merger process of Exide Life with HDFC Life was triggered with National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) in April 2022, which involved a detailed legal process with multiple representations before the NCLT bench and obtaining applicable approvals from various stakeholders. The company finally got the NCLT approval for the merger in September 2022 and obtained the IRDAI final approval in October 2022 to consummate the merger transaction in accordance with regulatory guidelines.   

This was in addition to the large volumes of business, advisory, and litigation cases managed by the legal department.  I oversee the legal department which is split into two silos, corporate legal and litigation.  

Under corporate legal, we work on all contractual documentation for the business, cover insurance product policy documentation, and provide corporate legal advisory on all projects. We execute almost 1,500-1,700 contracts annually apart from working on strategic investment mandates and business projects, providing routine legal advisory and contract negotiation for the business.   

Under Zonal legal, we handle pan India litigation cases covering insurance ombudsman, consumer forums, and civil and criminal matters with an approximate count of 3,000 plus cases. Due to the nature of the insurance business, there is a continuous influx of new legal cases or related disputes. The team must consistently focus on defending and disposing of the cases appropriately.   

As we enter the next decade, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?    

It is an interesting and very relevant question to prepare for the future.   

We are one of India’s largest private life insurers, and we have a team across legal, secretarial and compliance departments.   

To determine the skillset required by the legal department, we have to look at the sector, size, scale of operations, and geographical spread of the company. This could be managed well with extensive use of technology to optimise the resources, thereby improving productivity and efficiency.    

It is essential to focus on building a long-term and sustainable business, have an unwavering deep commitment to customers’ interests, create customer-friendly products, sustain investment in technology for customers and distributors alike, and implement policies for operational and sales efficiencies.   

The broad goal of the legal department is to be strategic, be the driving engine for corporations, and act as guardians of corporate governance principles. It should be able to anticipate issues and estimate risks, including reputational, business, regulatory and legal risks. The key objective is to proactively identify issues, provide solutions, balance risk and growth, and create a governing framework to seamlessly operate and ensure compliance with the regulations applicable to the company.   

In this fast-paced technological advancement era, the legal team needs to be highly agile and receptive to new ideas and changes. It should collaborate with the business while ensuring compliance with regulatory provisions. While core legal skills will always be a pre-requisite, the capability of the legal department to embrace technology tools in the digital age and assist the business in monetising opportunities could be a differentiating factor — AI can speed up the process of drafting legal papers through the use of tools for automated research, translation, document generation, and pre-population. Machine-reading algorithms can also review thousands of documents in minutes, freeing lawyers from repetitive, low-value tasks and giving them more time for high-value analysis and advice. These and other new solutions can help legal departments address capacity constraints and build up long-term value propositions in the system. Given the enormous quantities and value of data available from public and private sources, most next-generation legal departments will need data analysts or lawyers with analyst skills who can harness it. The insights from this analysis will play a powerful role in identifying and accelerating positive commercial outcomes, improving opportunities and enabling a high-performing team.    

The new legal digital agenda is an opportunity to bring in-house legal counsel further into the business and use digitisation and data connectivity to achieve hyper-awareness pre- and post-transactions. With real-time recognition of key events and how they may affect a position, prompting a need for contract review or counterparty communication, organisations can leverage an empowered legal team to drive measurable new value. The greatest risk, however, remains inaction and resting upon past laurels.