About

Landmark Group boasts one of the most successful retail portfolios in the MENA region, and has first class hospitality and healthcare divisions within the scope of its operations. It has always relied upon excellent in-house talent to safeguard and expand its business, which now account for 55,000 employees across 2,200 outlets. The Landmark legal team is led by Ravindra Desai, general manager for legal, and usually deals with a transactional spread encompassing leasing, franchising and distribution, IPR and licensing, ecommerce marketing, litigation and construction contracts. Constantly looking to innovate, the team has recently implemented a smart contracting tool, which Desai mentions as having ‘reduced the time required to do repetitive work’, leading to ‘improved contract management’.

Perhaps even more impressively, the team has been focusing on implementing block-chain technology to assist its global supply chain management. ‘Unlike traditional supply chains’, Desai explains, ‘which are very linear in approach with all participants focusing just on their respective responsibilities, the block-chain adds vision and transparency to the process as all participants can view the same page of the ledger’. The team manages to keep the lion’s share of its work – estimated to be around 95% – in-house, despite the variety of challenges it faces and the very high transactional volumes it has to deal with, as Desai explains: ‘Our team currently delivers over 5,000 contracts annually with an average turnaround time of 48 hours, besides managing an IP portfolio of more than 5,000 trademarks and hundreds of litigations matters across the Gulf Cooperation Council’. As well as Desai, ArunKhanna Kondattil, group legal counsel and formerly head of commercial finance at Tata Capital, came in for praise from nominators for his ‘commercial and objective attitude in resolving and settling disputes when this is necessary’.