Career Biography

Jolly serves as Managing Director and General Counsel at True North, bringing approximately 24 years of experience (including eight years at True North) to her current role. True North is one of India’s longest-standing, independent private equity firms, established in 1999 with a focus on investing in and helping transform mid-sized profitable businesses into industry leaders. Jolly focuses on managing risk for True North and building win–win relationships in the context of fundraising, investments, exits, and a complex regulatory environment. She also serves on True North’s investment committee and has been True North’s nominee director on some portfolio companies.

Jolly’s most memorable project at True North is the development of fair template agreements that True North can sign as a private equity buyer or seller of businesses. These templates were developed taking into account True North’s experience across many years of deal-making, and international drafting benchmarks. The added challenge on the templatisation project was automation of first-draft generation using legal tech, so that the tech-generated drafts can be finessed and negotiated by external counsel. This engagement gave Jolly a head start on legal tech initiatives and innovation projects. The templates themselves are subject to continuous improvement with each transaction.

Jolly’s focus on ‘first principles’ thinking, commercial clarity, deft and concise drafting, and commitment to excellence, learning, and finding solutions, has supplemented her experience and training as a lawyer and helped build effective internal systems and a wider ecosystem that delivers high-quality execution. She has grown her role from a high execution focus to becoming a thought partner on structuring, regulation, governance, transaction management, and complex situations. She also demonstrates leadership in building trusted relationships with stakeholders across the board.

Jolly developed her understanding of the law and practice of private equity, M&A and financing transactions, commercial contracts, and other corporate-commercial matters in 10 years at Desai & Diwanji. Before training as a lawyer, she worked in the not-for-profit space and also as a Human Resources management trainee at Unilever Bestfoods.

Jolly is an alumna of the University of Mumbai (with an LLB from Government Law College and a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Statistics from St Xavier’s College) and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, with an MA in Personnel Management & Industrial Relations.