Team size: Three

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

While we are unable to disclose confidential deal details, the past year has seen our legal function at Z47 navigating some complex and strategically meaningful work across our portfolio. As the legal team of a venture capital fund, broadly, our efforts have focused on financings across stages, cross-border restructurings, strategic M&A, and readiness initiatives for maturing companies.

We have executed multi-jurisdiction primary and secondary transactions involving sophisticated investor syndicates, bespoke rights structures, and intricate closing mechanics across jurisdictions. These matters required harmonising diverse regulatory regimes while balancing founder objectives with investor protections.

A significant body of work has centred on portfolio restructurings – cap-table clean-ups, governance resets, ESOP recalibrations, and liability reorganisations. These initiatives were undertaken to prepare companies for growth rounds, strategic participation from international investors, or long-term exit pathways.

Many of the deals we advised on involved valuation-linked protections, liquidation preference alignment, and multi-party negotiation frameworks. These transactions demanded careful structuring to ensure long-term stability in a constantly evolving funding environment.

For our more mature companies, we supported them in strengthening governance and disclosure frameworks consistent with long-term public-market readiness, and worked with leadership teams on legal hygiene and processes expected of late-stage growth companies. This included advisory work on board functioning, information flows, KMP oversight mechanisms, and enhanced compliance systems.

At the fund level, we continued to refine our legal operating model, enhancing compliance protocols, streamlining diligence and closing processes, and building scalable internal infrastructure capable of supporting higher deal velocity with discipline and rigour.

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

Instability – whether market-driven, regulatory, or arising within a portfolio company – demands a legal head or GC who can bring clarity, composure, and structured decision-making. My approach rests on three principles.

First, I prioritise rapid issue-mapping and early identification of core legal and commercial risks, separating what is material from what is peripheral to enable teams to make decisive and informed choices.

Secondly, I rely on principle-driven alignment. In moments of uncertainty, I anchor communication in facts, documentation, and first-order legal principles to ensure that founders, investors, and internal teams operate with a shared understanding of risk, responsibility, and the options available to them.
Thirdly, I focus on building long-term resilience rather than short-term fixes. Whether renegotiating rights, restructuring obligations, or establishing interim governance mechanisms, I aim for durable solutions that preserve trust, optionality, and long-term value.

Ultimately, legal leadership in a crisis is about converting ambiguity into coherence. By combining disciplined risk management with commercial sensitivity, we aim to maintain organisational resilience while safeguarding the interests of all stakeholders.

AI has been taken seriously as a potentially revolutionary technological change in the legal world for a number of years now. Has it had a meaningful impact in how your legal team works in this time?

AI has had a significantly meaningful effect on our legal function, but largely through quiet and compounding efficiency gains. We use AI to streamline drafting, comparative analysis, precedent extraction, research, and issue-spotting across multi-jurisdictional transactions. For a venture capital fund that routinely works across India, Singapore, Mauritius, and Delaware structures, these tools allow us to produce high-quality work with far greater speed and consistency.

AI also assists with first-pass reviews of routine documents – such as NDAs, vendor agreements, and template-based contracts – by pointing out key variations, highlighting risks, and summarising changes. This enables the team to allocate human time to the strategic layers of work rather than mechanical review.

Importantly, we have implemented AI within a controlled governance framework, ensuring confidentiality and mandatory human oversight of all outputs. As a result, the legal team spends less time on repetitive tasks and more time on commercial structuring, negotiation strategy, and supporting founders through complex decision-making.

Ultimately, the real impact of AI has been to elevate the legal team’s role to that of strategic partners in transactions, allowing us to operate with greater velocity, accuracy, and insight.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?

Three trends stand out.

First, increasing regulatory scrutiny – across data, foreign investment pathways, digital payments, and capital flows – means that legal teams must build more robust compliance systems earlier in a company’s life. Deferring good governance hygiene is no longer viable.

Second, valuation discipline and capital efficiency have redefined deal dynamics in the venture ecosystem. This has led to a rise in structured rounds, secondary liquidity solutions, and hybrid rights packages that require deeper legal sophistication.

Third, corporate governance expectations are rising rapidly, even for private companies.

Independent oversight, information-flow protocols, conflict processes, and KMP accountability have become essential. In-house counsel now need to prepare their organisations for a future in which private markets increasingly mirror the governance standards expected of public companies.

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?

We retain matters in-house when they require rapid turnaround, commercial judgement, or an intimate understanding of our fund’s risk frameworks. At the same time, for the majority of our investment activity, we work closely with external counsel as integrated partners in the deal process.

We engage external firms not only for our regular transaction flow but also when we need a second pair of eyes, deeper jurisdiction-specific insight, or specialised expertise. This includes cross-border structuring, complex regulatory questions, capital-markets considerations, and high-stakes M&A or secondary transactions where nuanced legal interpretations materially influence outcomes.

We evaluate advisers on the following criteria: technical excellence and clarity of reasoning; commercial practicality of solutions rather than theoretical analysis; responsiveness and ownership, particularly during fast-paced transactions; alignment with our values – collaborative problem-solving, balanced risk assessment, and the ability to work constructively with founders and co-investors; and consistently delivering high-quality, commercially minded work.