About

Can you explain the roles of team members within the department?

I have five other lawyers in my team and one paralegal: a brief profile of each is given below: Assistant general manager – legal, Salil Date acts as a deputy in my absence and handles corporate secretarial work, critical litigations, criminal matters, competition law matters, general advisory and high value contracts. Senior manager – legal and GRC, Bhoomi Shah handles GRC functions, contracting functions, general advisory, regulatory compliances and IPR issues. Chief manager – legal, Umesh Khadpe handles product litigation, warehousing projects, legal metrology matters and legal MIS. Senior manager – legal and GRC, Shailesh Bhardwaj handles product litigations, civil litigations, customer related documentation and digitalisation projects of legal. Senior manager – legal, Satish Khade handles contracting, advisory functions and dealer/business partner separations. Paralegal Nilesh Sonawane is administrative assistant for legal matters. This is the best combination for a team size that I handle in Volkswagen Group, which consists of divisions or brands like Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini and Group After Sales and Vehicle Logistics. The independence within the legal team has enabled them to synergise with the brands as well as other group companies and they are able to understand the business needs of the internal and external customers.

What are the most significant activities that your legal team has been involved with in the last two years?

Anti-trust cases: My team has been involved in various investigations by the Competition Commission of India (CCI), an Indian anti-trust authority, for not only Indian entities but also the parent companies in Germany. These are investigations under the Indian Competition Act. We have led writ petitions for challenging the contentious verdict of the CCI for the entire Volkswagen Group and ensured that such developments had a minimal impact on business operations. Dealer litigation case management: We are plagued by huge dealer litigations which causes considerable loss of time and resources as every dealer legal case runs into a multi-million euro claim. To avoid this we have developed a mechanism to get involved with business teams to ensure that the business is fully prepared with proper documentation in order to have a strong legal defence. We are also steering the business teams to strive for settlement in cases which have high stakes involved and where we see an endless legal battle. Further as a legal strategy, sensing that the case may go critical, our legal team has started taking pro-active steps of initiating arbitration claims with Mumbai jurisdiction to prevent litigants from forum shopping and create nuisance value before local courts.

What developments in India have impacted your organisation and the team the most?

Political, economic and regulatory changes affect every business and our company is affected the most being in the automotive business. This includes changes in law, introduction of new legislations, replications of norms and standards of foreign legislations in India, changes in tax regimes, etc. Increases in rates of GST and motor vehicle taxes as well as vehicle registration fees adversely impacts the business. Changes in laws pertaining to motor vehicles regulations pertaining to end consumers have an impact on the legal planning for product related legal cases. It is not easy to overcome the challenges as some of these changes are introduced too soon into our system, sometimes without the market being mature.

Apart from legal matters, does the team work on other company initiatives?

The legal department also handles GRC functions. As part of the function, legal is actively involved in risk and compliance activity of Volkswagen Group. We undertake rollouts of various compliance and integrity policies followed up by awareness workshops and training program. We also undertake the risk recording activity of the company. Human Resources takes advice from the legal department while developing CSR programmes. We are also involved in the CSR agency selection and scheme finalisation, including completing all documentation pertaining to achieving objectives under CSR.

In what ways has the team driven efficiencies within its processes?

We have an implemented the AI enabled IT solution, “Provakil”, to get live updates of all legal cases and get alerts of new filings, filed against Volkswagen Group before the same are served on us. This has prevented to a great extent, the possibility of ex-parte orders or injunctions due to unserved summons. The legal team is the custodian of more than thousand contracts; the entire contract life cycle management is handled within the department. Our in-house developed contract management repository, provides instant access to all contracts (scanned copies) and provides alerts for contracts nearing expiry. The business and operational risk management process is also led by the legal team. The risk process is implemented by interacting with all departments on annual basis and all business risks are documented in structured manner so that mitigation plan can be initiated in a timely manner by way of productive counter measures and efficient management controls. Focus on…