Team Size: Nine

Aditya Shamlal has served as Senior Director and Head of Legal at Zeta since 2021. He is a technology lawyer with over 17 years of experience advising a range of companies, technology businesses, and global corporations on commercial, transactional, and regulatory matters within the technology sector. His expertise encompasses technology transactions, data protection, digital payments, fintech, and other related fields.

Prior to joining Zeta, Aditya was a partner at GameChanger Law Advisors, a boutique corporate law firm focusing on technology, media, sports, and entertainment industries, as well as mergers and acquisitions and venture capital transactions.

Aditya is an alumnus of the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, where he completed his BA LLB (Hons) degree in 2008. He was recruited by Amarchand Mangaldas Suresh A Shroff & Co. (as it was known at the time) and was based in their New Delhi office. His experience also includes three years in litigation, during which he appeared before the Supreme Court of India, the Delhi High Court, various district courts in Delhi, and multiple tribunals.

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

Earlier this year, Zeta received a strategic investment from a Fortune 5 healthcare company, which resulted in the company’s valuation increasing significantly. This complex, multi-jurisdictional transaction was negotiated and managed by Zeta’s in-house legal team, with support from law firms across multiple jurisdictions.

One of Zeta’s marquee Indian clients is HDFC Bank, India’s largest private bank and a global top-20 financial institution by valuation. Zeta supports HDFC Bank across a broad range of complex technology programmes and transformations. This includes PayZapp, an award-winning modern payments app, and the newly introduced Credit Line on UPI, among various other initiatives. Zeta’s in-house legal team has supported these engagements throughout their entire lifecycle, leveraging its expertise in Indian law across areas such as intellectual property, financial technology products and services, and other critical dimensions.
 
How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

The approach depends on the nature of the crisis. If it arises from a natural disaster or an internet infrastructure failure, the responses and specific actions may vary in detail.

However, in most periods of crisis or instability, the logical approach generally follows three stages. First, immediate action—crisis management or crisis aversion—which requires rapid decision-making and deployment of solutions. For example, this might involve activating internal business continuity and disaster recovery plans and allocating responsibilities across functions, including legal, with clearly defined roles, tasks, and accountability.

Next, it is essential to identify any regulatory compliance obligations that may be affected by the crisis or instability, and contractual issues that might arise. Both aspects must be addressed simultaneously to mitigate risk effectively.
Communication is equally critical. Stakeholders must receive accurate and informative updates without breaching confidentiality. This includes employees, consultants, vendors, customers, investors or shareholders, and, where appropriate, the media.

Finally, it is vital to limit potential damage. Actions taken during a crisis can sometimes produce knock-on effects, where the remedy is worse than the problem. Every step should be carefully considered to avoid unintended consequences.

On the impact of AI, it has unquestionably transformed how our legal team operates. We have implemented playbooks for various contracts, including NDAs, vendor agreements below a certain value, and simple commercial contracts. By combining these playbooks with AI, we are able to review, comment, and redline efficiently. This automation of repeatable processes has freed legal resources to focus on higher-impact work.

AI will continue to evolve and become applicable to more complex use cases. At present, however, it already allows us to execute repeatable business-as-usual work with a high degree of efficiency.
 
What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?
   
The decision to engage external legal services is generally limited to matters for which our in-house team lacks internal subject-matter expertise. For example, on the Indian law side, encompassing general corporate and contracting work, we take pride in rarely needing external counsel for any of the work handled by our team. Even for foreign law contracts, given that our customer agreements require substantial product and technical domain knowledge, the bulk of the work is undertaken by our internal legal team, with support, of course, from local jurisdiction lawyers engaged as required for such contracts.

When we do engage external lawyers, we evaluate them based on their domain and industry knowledge, responsiveness and availability, openness to considering alternatives and engaging in creative problem-solving, and their cost-effectiveness and efficiency in managing their time.