How has the increasing consciousness of climate change and sustainability affected your company and the team’s priorities?

We, at Unacademy, are striving every day to make a difference. The organisation has undertaken a number of measures towards sustainability. A few such initiatives are firstly, our office building being largely reliant on solar energy for its power needs. This reduces emissions and saves fuel. Secondly, we are an online edtech platform with limited physical presence – we have strict guidelines on usage of paper and aim to stay true to our roadmap of democratising education online. Next, our canteens and cafeterias are equipped with biodegradable utensils with no use of plastic and lastly our washrooms use recycled water.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this? 

It is as important as deciding an external counsel on basis of its expertise or skillset. After having spent most of my career as an external counsel, I recognise and understand the relevance or importance of an external advisor aligning its attitude and work product to a client’s values and vision.

At Unacademy, all the external counsel that we presently work with are largely chosen on whether they align with our core values. Illustratively: (a) to deliver quality work product; (b) to turn around the work product at lightning speed; and (c) to take complete ownership of driving mandates. These core values are intrinsic and relevant for every single individual who works with the Unacademy legal team and we expect all our external counsel to imbibe the same attributes as well.

What is a cause, business or otherwise, you are passionate about and why?

Driving adoption of legal tech by lawyers is something very close to my heart. Mind you, I have not always been a staunch supporter of legal tech (particularly, when I was an external counsel and believed that technology was incapable of solving legal problems for clients). However, it needed a change in attitude, which was primarily driven by the desire to bring efficiencies in the way legal teams are run in-house. There are, and will always be, some limitations around building large-sized legal teams in-house, as the legal function is always perceived to be a risk mitigation function, as opposed to the culture in law firms. Technology can be adopted in several aspects of an in-house legal function. Illustratively, we use legal tech solutions for contract management lifecycle, litigation lifecycle, IP lifecycle, document review and formatting and more. In fact, we have been able to build a solution for the legal team at Unacademy with the help of our product / tech team. I strongly believe that legal tech products can be great additions to in-house legal teams to improve efficiencies and processes. The only challenge to overcome is to convince lawyers to embrace technology!