About

Madhu Sivaram Muttathil started off as a litigator back in 1997 before switching to an in-house corporate career a couple of years later. He debuted in-house with IBS Software Services, a privately held entity catering primarily to the travel, transportation and logistics sector where his primary responsibility was to manage client deals worldwide. Post IBS, he took a sabbatical to pursue an LLM and subsequently joined Sapient, a major US consulting firm supporting India, Asia Pacific and the UK. In February 2012, Muttathil joined Avaya and took on his current role as senior corporate counsel, India and SAARC. At Avaya, a communication and collaboration company, his mandate is to provide legal, transactional and strategic support to India and South Asia operations. He also serves on the India board and India leadership team (ILT) and supporting them with corporate secretarial governance and region-wide strategic initiatives respectively. Some of his key endeavours have been to simplify processes and empower the business to drive certain decisions with little or no reliance on legal and reduce financial exposure. This has involved being responsive and approachable to enabling the business to negotiate certain contracts and forms using standard templates to proactively diffuse potential disputes. He has also driven an initiative to facilitate recovery of outstanding receivables by the company. Muttathil has led on many critical transactions over the past three years such as a multi-million dollar customer deal with one of the largest telecom players in Asia, and divestitures and acquisitions. The deal was completed in the face of a turbulent financial situation at the company, a potential Chapter 11 filing, which was headed off successfully with the help of Muttathil’s team. On his team’s success, Muttathil says, ‘while law and commerce often dominate contract negotiations, one should also endeavour to build enduring relationships that may well prove to be the clincher. Another key learning was that strategic use of leverage helps meeting the ultimate objective especially when you have a cast-in-stone deadline’.