About

Can you briefly explain how the legal team is structured?

The India and Asia Pacific legal team is headed by Narayanan T, senior vice president and general counsel – India and Asia Pacific. With over 25 years of experience in independent private practice and as an in-house counsel in the banking and manufacturing sectors, Narayanan’s current responsibility includes managing Cognizant’s entire in-house Asia Pacific team of 70 legal professionals. Narayanan’s experience spans all aspects of legal expertise, encompassing contracting, litigation, compliance, anti-corruption, M&A, and management. Subhadip Sarkar, assistant vice president, leads our legal operations and governance, IP and technology management, global procurement and India government affairs. Enumerated below are the key functions of Cognizant’s legal team, each of which is steered by highly experienced professionals: Commercial Transactions: This team helps internal stakeholders negotiate and finalise business-critical transactions, thus enabling revenue growth. The team also advises the business on all legal aspects of commercial deals. Further, the team assists internal stakeholders to navigate the complex legal and regulatory landscape, including new types of services, products and platforms. The team advises our executive leadership team on contracting risks and emerging market trends, and provides information and training to our internal teams on new laws, processes and best practices in commercial contracting. Dispute and Litigation: This team works with the business and corporate stakeholders to develop and execute policies and best practices to avoid/manage legal disputes, determine the best course of action, and develop creative solutions that achieve optimal outcomes. To date, it has managed numerous disputes to successful outcomes across diverse areas ranging from employment/HR and intellectual property, to securities, commercial contracts, and immigration.

Intellectual Property: The ability to innovate as a team is one of Cognizant’s greatest strengths and we refer to the fruits of our innovation, i.e. knowledge and IP, methodologies, inventions, strategies, software, algorithms, designs and other creative output as “intellectual assets.” Our success depends on our ability to protect our intellectual assets, mitigate IP risks, and ensure IP compliance across the globe. We achieve all these goals through our IP policies and programmes, contract terms, and the legal protection afforded by various registered IPRs. This team guides the company to expand and protect the portfolio of intellectual assets and IPRs, avoids any misuse of others’ intellectual assets or IPRs, helps inventory organisation and tracking of our intellectual assets and IPRs, and creates value with go-to-market business models that effectively and responsibly monetise our intellectual assets. Corporate Governance and Secretarial: This team is responsible for advising the business on corporate governance matters, and handling corporate legal filings for and maintaining the corporate books and records of, Cognizant and its various subsidiaries. The corporate governance team also handles the creation of new subsidiaries and the consolidation of existing subsidiaries, as needed. The corporate secretary function is responsible for maintaining the corporate secretary files for Cognizant and its various subsidiaries.

What recent political, economic or regulatory changes in India have impacted your company and the team the most?

Like all other companies, our company and industry has witnessed numerous political, regulatory and economic changes over the past year that have had a bearing on our operations. Some of the significant regulations are in the areas of labour laws, taxation, and PF/ESI, to name a few. However, as a proactive and futuristic team, we have successfully monitored potential economic and regulatory changes with an operational impact. As a team, we keep ourselves equipped to handle such changes, and implement requisite changes to our processes and practices to help the smooth and efficient conduct of our business. The legal function at Cognizant includes a team of lawyers who provide counsel to Cognizant’s executive management, corporate functions, and business units on complex regulatory areas. The team collaborates on setting our corporate policies in accordance with the applicable laws. We have an internal mechanism to proactively monitor and set appropriate controls to minimise the impact.

What will be the main focus for the company in the next 12 months and how does the team intend to assist with this?

Cognizant is at the forefront of cutting-edge technology and has a laser-sharp focus on AI and analytics, digital engineering, IoT, process automation, and interactive services. To help speed clients’ digital transformation journeys, we bring our digital capabilities and industry expertise together into horizontal offerings and industry solutions that help realise the promise of today’s technology. We help employees stay up-to-date and explore new and emerging technologies by way of study circles, internal in-person/virtual sessions on select topics, as well as participation in external conferences and seminars. Cognizant Academy, our learning and development function, regularly conducts certificate courses, technology symposiums, and customised training programmes for our teams on emerging technology areas. Our employees also participate in various hackathons and Women in Technology forums! Being in the knowledge economy, we look at continuous learning as our success mantra as well as competitive advantage! Cognizant firmly believes in job rotation and encourages its employees to learn new practices and adapt to changing business needs. Further, Cognizant continually fine-tunes existing processes to make them more effective and robust.

How has the team harnessed technology to improve output or drive efficiencies?

Over the past year-and-a-half, the team has explored various technologies to facilitate better collaboration with business teams and address their growing demand for insights, advice and counsel in the areas of contract management, IP management, corporate governance, regulatory compliance, and open source code compliance in a more efficient and effective manner. With teams spread across different regions, the legal function has created central repositories for processes, workflows, internal policies, etc. to enable more efficient collaboration and stay abreast of changes. Our team is proactive in preparing to adapt to changes in technology.

Can you sum up the team culture/ethos?

In keeping with Cognizant’s guiding philosophy, the legal team has also adopted a customer-centric approach in executing its day-to-day activities. Be it technology adoption or the handling of work, the team actively collaborates with all stakeholders for easier and faster closure of business transactions. As a diverse team distributed across the globe, we ensure alignment with our core values by continuously keeping pace with changes in technology, improving processes, and adopting industry best practices.