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What challenges has the team faced when covering multiple jurisdictions in the region?

Challenges with regard to multiple jurisdictions are mainly conducting business ethically in compliance with anti-trust laws as well as compliance with public liability exposures and local tax laws in foreign countries. Additionally, challenges in IP violations. We outright reject any request to compromise with ethical business practices. To ensure zero or less liabilities on public liability laws, we have inbuilt safety policies with strong training modules and we monitor the same by surprise audits as well as routine audits. On safety and ethics, the company follows zero tolerance policy. Employees are put into field only after strict installation training and certification. We normally shift tax and local laws compliance to the local customer. In rare cases when we take this as our obligation, we keep a buffer and pay taxes. So, tax law compliance is converted into commercial challenge. Many a times we face challenges in handling infrastructure contracts, especially one-sided, non-negotiable clauses. We do detailed risk identification in the project. Identified risks are then mitigated by transferring to insurance, vendors and strong project management.

How does the team ensure it remains a true business partner to the company?

We are successful in developing trust among the internal stakeholders, so that they have faith in being open and transparent with us for the advice and support. Our approach is to understand the proposals, queries and practical issues, then work on risk identification discussion to ensure a risk mitigation with solution… We have bagged number of prestigious infrastructure projects across the country. We are proud to be partnering the country’s infrastructure growth.

How significant is collaboration within the legal team and how does that improve output?

All the team members are qualified “Quality champions” from Schindler group programmes. We work on three important principles: “Collaboraction”, Schindler terminology which ensures collaboration within and with other teams or internal customers; “Front loading” which involves handling and solving issues or problems at the first point and not keeping it for trouble shooting at the end; and “Continuous improvement”, that is, improving our own performance constantly on a regular basis.

Team members interact with each other for expert advice. In our legal team each member operates as a general as well as subject matter expert, for instance, competition, IBC, IP, arbitration, section 138, criminal matters, and fraud to mention few. Whereas each person’s basic job responsibility is fixed, 25 to 30% part is kept flexible to take care of unplanned challenges. The extra or free time, if any, is utilised for updating with market developments & changes/challenges in GRC. Focus on…