Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense? 

The company currently lacks a contract management tool. Instead of incurring a substantial cost to acquire such a tool and addressing the associated training requirements for our numerous business development employees (numbering in the hundreds and experiencing a high turnover and attrition rate), I developed and implemented a standard operating procedure (SOP). This SOP is housed in a live Google document, visible to the entire organisation, and is updated when required with improvements.

The intention here was to streamline the document review process, reducing the burden on the legal team. Simultaneously, it serves to clearly communicate to teams the specific points in a contract requiring their input, such as commercial and operational aspects. The SOP was introduced in January of this year and has proven effective in enhancing efficiency. It achieves this by reducing the overall contracting time from initiation to execution while also lessening the workload on the legal team. Importantly, these improvements were realised without incurring any additional costs.

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

In 2021, the company acquired the entire share capital of SpotOn Logistics, a Bangalore-based logistics company, to strengthen its B2B offering, specifically in the express part truckload market. The integration of SpotOn with the company, which occurred between 2022 and 2023, was the largest logistics integration in India. It involved the integration of 2,000+ SpotOn team members, 5,500+ customers, and a 2.5M sq ft infrastructure spread across 350 operating facilities. The legal team played a vital role during the integration, liaising with a host of different stakeholders across the company and SpotOn on multiple action items. These ranged from aligning processes and policies to streamlining agreements and negotiating terms with customers being moved from SpotOn to the company.

What is a cause, business related or otherwise, that you care about, and why?

A cause I believe in is the right of every person to easily access justice. Legal services and justice are something that each and every person should be entitled to, irrespective of any other metric. This would ensure that the justice system is not misused by the few against the many.