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

At Vedanta my team and I are involved in several strategic litigations that have industry-wide impact, in sectors like metals and mining, power and laws like IBC, Environment and Mining. I am personally involved in rendering strategic legal advice to mitigate risk arising from regulatory issues, trade sanctions, championing legal governance throughout the company and handling multi-billion-dollar international arbitrations, equity and debt capital market transactions, M&A transactions including intra-Group restructurings.

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

Managing crisis requires preparedness and building robust legal systems and governance processes so that so that right resources i.e. people, information and strategy can be deployed seamlessly at a moment’s notice. It also requires collaboration with cross-functional teams involving corporate communications, finance and investor relations and providing legal guidance to all functions to respond appropriately in case of crisis.

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?

The use of AI in legal is the next big trend in Legal Industry and while there’s a lot of hype around this the delivery at times is lacking and what in-house lawyers need to be mindful of is that LLM often work on the data that is fed into them. This means that you would be training the AI most of the time and maybe a bit more inefficiently than training a junior lawyer.

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?

Some tasks like research, translation and creation of very basic first level drafts have become easier but reviewing these has become more tedious as AI work presents newer errors not seen earlier and would not generally be committed by humans.

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? 

Response: The obvious criteria are expertise in court-craft and procedures, and we generally engage external legal counsels only to handle disputes. The criteria for selection are three (i) subject matter expertise of the external counsel; (ii) proven track record of success and client testimonials; and (iii) cost efficiency.