Career Biography

Migi Roy is Senior Legal Counsel at Apollo Global Management, based in Singapore. He manages legal coverage across the APAC region — including India, North Asia, Japan, Southeast Asia and Australia — primarily supporting Apollo’s private credit and hybrid investment strategies.

Prior to joining Apollo, Migi spent time on secondment at a major Australian bank and a global aluminium manufacturer and practiced at top-tier international law firms across Singapore, the Middle East and Australia, advising on complex cross-border credit transactions in the real estate, infrastructure and leveraged finance space. Migi has also worked extensively on restructurings.

What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

We completed the largest investment grade private credit deal in India this year in the infrastructure sector. While private credit in APAC has historically been associated with special situation investments, this transaction follows the headwinds in US and Europe where investment grade private credit is gaining more market share from the traditional financing routes for robust IG issuers (banks, capital markets).

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

Ensure all stakeholders have a seat at the table. Complex legal issues can have multiple touch points within global organisations so it’s important to think laterally.

Be contrarian – it’s the informal motto at Apollo. If you aren’t fostering a challenge culture and bringing different views to the table, you will miss opportunities and solutions beyond your own.

What do you think are the most important attributes for a modern in-house counsel to possess?

Bring people together and share insights across the organisation. The legal function has insight into every single facet of a company. This can be extremely useful information for other business units. That interconnectivity and simply knowing the right person to talk to can be extremely impactful for business teams.

What do you think is the greatest innovation you have enacted in the past year?

Unsurprisingly, it is AI related. We have created an in-house AI tool (ChatGPT based) that can scour the Apollo databases for information. This tool is in early stages but the main challenge we have seen is the rate of AI adoption and getting teams to bring AI into their day-to-day work. So, while the AI tool is an incredible innovation, our success is in the adoption rate, which is something I have personally taken ownership of within the team.

General counsel often speak of the need to be strategic to reach the pinnacle of the profession. What does being strategic mean to you?

Knowing how best to deploy legal resources so the team has the most impact. Internal legal at multinational organisations can very easily find themselves stretched in multiple directions. So, it is important to analyse every day whether the team is working on the most important matters for the business and allocating work appropriately (e.g. to external counsel, paralegals or other service providers).