Team size: Approximately 15

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?  

In terms of commercial contracts, we were managing approximately 200 vendor contracts a month, broadly falling in eight to nine varieties. We used different kind of templates for these contracts. Given that the primary differences were services and goods, we wanted to fully automate the process such that we had a single framework or master agreement and one pager service and goods SOW.  

Firstly, we created a framework agreement which would work for all varieties and, thereafter, we created nine forms of SOWs. Finally, we created a ‘self-serve form’ – which is like a questionnaire with our contract management tool. Once a business team member fills the questionnaire, a contract gets auto generated and cannot be downloaded for edits. this contract can directly be sent to the counter party.  

Through this, we were able to free up 35-40% of the bandwidth of the commercial contracts team. 

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

India has a new Digital Data Protection legislation. The implementation, especially for a business like ours which has minors, can be difficult. We created a roadmap for all our online platforms, did a data mapping analysis and are in the midst of implementing the changes needed – both from a legal and technical or engineering standpoint – for all our online platforms.  

In our business, educators breaching their exclusivity contractual obligations is fairly common. This not only affects business continuity as they suddenly exit, but they also fail to return money they receive upon joining. Given that we had been struggling with recoveries, we produced a litigation strategy e focusing on interim injunctions freezing the bank accounts of these educators. We have been successful at it thus far and this has resulted in fantastic outcomes in terms of these educators agreeing to return our money. 

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

Do not be afraid of being a generalist. In fact, be proud of being one. Be solution oriented; time and again you will be presented with opportunities to take a purely legal call or a business and legal call. Always focus on trying to achieve the latter while being conscious of the risk and ability to mitigate or it.