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?  

I started holding regular meetings and discussions with the business teams and briefing them on key legal issues that may affect the business, and we proactively took steps to mitigate risks for the firm and the portfolio companies (in several cases by engaging with regulators and external advisors in advance) to help business continuity and insulate from regulatory risk and mitigation costs. 

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

Managing all fundraising and related issues, including the latest fund raise of $675m for Elevation Capital; managed and closed all legal aspects of more than 50 new investments in the year and several liquidity and exit transactions, including growth rounds in companies and public listing of Senco Gold – one of India’s largest organised omni channel jewellery chain; managed and negotiated a large exit with several buyers in a large, regulated entity in the financial services sector with a deal size of over $120m 

We also successfully resolved large and complex legal issues faced by the fund and several portfolio companies, such as civil and criminal litigation, data protection and privacy issues, and tax litigation; acted as de-facto legal head to several portfolio companies, advising them of critical legal issues including on regulatory and tax investigations and setting up their legal function, structure and hiring; implemented several institutional and knowledge management processes for the fund, such as document storage and management, document automation, third party engagement standards and presented on key legal issues.  

We played a part in the venture capital industry initiative to standardise transaction documents (Project Simple), similar to NVCA form documents in the US, with other leading venture capital funds.  

If you had to give advice to an aspiring in-house lawyer or general counsel, what would it be and why? 

My advice would be to find practical solutions that would help companies manage and minimise risk and develop institutional processes in place to improve legal compliance and risk mitigation in various scenarios.