Team size:   31

Career biography

Ruchi Kaushal is the General Counsel of Cable & Wireless Communications. She is responsible for providing strategic legal advice to the executive management team and setting the internal governance policies to establish the company’s legal and regulatory priorities. She has over 20 years of international legal experience in-house and in private practice, specializing in corporate finance, M&A, public company reporting, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility and diversity matters.

In Ruchi’s prior positions she demonstrated a proven ability to deal with complex legal issues, with a solutions-oriented, practical approach to negotiating multi-party corporate, financial and commercial arrangements. She started her career at Shearman & Sterling LLP in the Capital Markets group in Toronto, New York and London. She joined Virgin Media Inc., as an Assistant General Counsel, and she moved to Liberty Global plc in London to serve as VP, Senior Corporate Counsel. She move to Cable & Wireless as VP, General Counsel in 2017.

Ruchi has a B.A. in Commerce and Economics from University of Toronto, a LL.B., Law from York University – Osgoode Hall Law School, and a M.B.A. in Finance and Accounting from Schulich School of Business – York University. She is a founding director of the Cable & Wireless Charitable Foundation and also serves on the Board for Cable & Wireless Jamaica Limited and the Senior Advisory Board for the Apollo Leadership Institute. She lives in Miami with her husband and 2 children.

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

Over the past year, my legal team and I have been engaged in a range of strategically significant and commercially impactful matters across our markets, supporting growth, efficiency, and risk management:

We led legal support on a confidential M&A transaction to acquire additional spectrum in Jamaica, enabling an enhanced mobile customer experience while reducing long-term capital investment in physical tower infrastructure. This work required complex regulatory, transactional, and cross-functional coordination.

The team and I also supported a key strategic priority to digitize government services through the negotiation and execution of multiple high-value B2G ICT agreements. Legal played a central role in structuring risk-appropriate commercial terms, addressing public sector procurement requirements, and enabling scalable delivery across markets.

We also spent time managing and mitigating risk arising from minority shareholder oppression claims in different markets, supporting the company’s efforts to streamline its operational structure while protecting governance integrity and limiting financial and reputational exposure.

Finally, we designed a bespoke claims damage assessment tool to support the technology teams in systematically capturing evidence and quantify losses arising from third-party damage to our network infrastructure. We believe this initiative will strengthen enforcement, improve recovery outcomes, and reinforce accountability for network protection.

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

Operating across more than 24 Caribbean jurisdictions, our organisation faces sustained exposure to hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and flooding. Since becoming General Counsel at Cable & Wireless, I have led the legal function through multiple Category 3+ hurricanes and other major natural disasters. These experiences shaped a clear strategic focus: ensuring the legal function is crisis-ready and fully aligned with the company’s wider technology-led resilience strategy.

My approach has been to build a dedicated legal crisis capability that integrates seamlessly into the organisation’s overall hurricane preparedness programme. Five years ago, I established and led a cross-jurisdictional legal task force to capture lessons learned from prior events and translate them into a practical, repeatable framework for the legal team. The resulting Hurricane Preparedness Playbook is now embedded within our legal operating model and feeds directly into the company’s broader preparedness efforts, which are primarily driven by the technology teams.

The playbook provides decision-ready guidance tailored specifically to legal risk during crises, including structured checklists for pre-, during-, and post-event actions; predefined cross-market legal coverage to eliminate single points of failure; and streamlined, user-friendly legal tools that enable the business to move quickly during recovery. This has significantly reduced legal response times, improved coordination with operational teams, and ensured that legal advice supports, rather than slows, critical network restoration and customer-facing decisions. This was evident in our most recent experience with Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica. Legal delivered end-to-end support to launch a new product in partnership with Starlink under intense time pressure, including contracting, development of new customer terms and conditions, and clearance of all external communications, allowing the product to launch without delay and within defined risk parameters.

Post-event, the legal function remains central to recovery, supporting emergency procurement, claims management, and litigation strategy to accelerate rebuild timelines and manage downside risk. By building a legal crisis framework that is both specialised and tightly integrated with the organization’s technology-led resilience planning, legal is positioned as a trusted advisor and a key contributor to organizational resilience during periods of instability and crisis.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

A defining theme of my career has been deliberately pushing beyond traditional legal boundaries to drive growth and transformation. My time at Liberty Global was particularly formative: operating within a culture that actively encouraged innovation allowed me to challenge established ways of working, especially within the high yield financing area, where we were able to approach our work with the question of “Why Not?”. That experience reinforced my belief that meaningful professional growth comes from questioning orthodoxies and being prepared to do things differently.

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?

We are still in the early stages of AI’s impact on how organiaztions operate and make decisions, but its implications for legal teams are already profound. Much like the advent of personal computing, AI is reshaping how work is performed, how risk is managed, and how value is delivered. In-house lawyers need to stay close to how AI is being deployed within their businesses and take an active role in shaping its responsible use, as this technology will fundamentally redefine how legal teams collaborate with the wider organisation.  Two years ago, I did not know what ChatGPT was, and now I cannot imagine a day when I am not using AI to improve my understanding and productivity.