About

‘Open. Connected. Useful. Personal. These four words sum up the ethos of the team and the organisation as a whole’ says Sandhya Vishal, chief counsel and compliance and integrity leader for global data and information company Nielsen in India. A lawyer and leader with over 17 years of experience and significant exposure to commercial, transactional, regulatory, litigation and government relations matters, Vishal is in charge of a team containing three lawyers that has immediate plans to expand its legal staff in the coming year. The team is structured to facilitate and enable both legal and integrity streams of work, and Vishal provides the overall structure and direction for both functions and in doing so, works closely with business, risk, security and HR functions on a multitude of matters including transactional, ethics and compliance, risk issues and core employment issues. A team guided by strong ethical principles and high standards, in addition to the numerous transactions and legalities the team is responsible for, it is charged with the implementation and enforcement of a code of conduct while being the moral compass for the Leadership team. Being in a data intense business, Nielsen is the custodian to its client in measuring their performance. It’s here that a robust integrity program which relentlessly focuses on doing thing in the right way, helping build a culture where our employees feels safe to report or speak up. In her role as the Ombudsman, Sandhya is responsible for effecting the whistle-blower policy and resolution of complaints for the entire South Asia region. Ramya Sridhar – in her role as manager-legal – and Anupama Nair in her role as integrity and legal assistant are both known to have a huge impact in the successful execution of these tasks. The in-house legal team plays a very important role in ‘not merely managing things but to be a clear stakeholder in business decisions and strategic direction of the company. The team plays a very important role in effectively implementing processes and polices to protect the assets of the company’. Speaking about the team’s approach, Vishal claims that it is ‘adaptive to each business situation, thereby being an enabler. The role is not purely legal in nature but includes a technical and commercial understanding of the situation and an analysis of the risk and mitigation’. Acting with agility and diligence – for example there have been ‘significant efforts’ in training employees on the Commercial contracting process which has been done along with the finance department. Further showing its credentials in being interdepartmental, the team plays a significant with security team in laying the foundation for data protection policies and other privacy protection needed from a data measurement company perspective.