Former Supreme Court judge, Retired Justice BN Srikrishna addressed a gathering of general counsels, senior lawyers and CEOs of various companies in Mumbai on Thursday evening. This august gathering was for the release of a book entitled In House Matters: A Complete Handbook for the Modern General Counsel.
Justice Srikrishna, who is one of the many endorsers of the book, described the role of the modern day General Counsel to be similar to that of a Rajpurohit in medieval times. He said-
“A General Counsel’s role is similar to that of a Rajpurohit, in the olden days it was Rajpurohits that guided Kings to administer their empire and if they listened to the Rajpurohit, they ruled happily.”
Apart from Justice Srikrishna, Lakshmi Iyer, Group President – Investments, Bajaj Finserv; CEO, Bajaj Alts, N.S. Kannan, Independent Director; Former MD & CEO, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance and Hitesh Sethia, CEO & Managing Director, Jio Financial Services shared their perspectives on the book and larger discussion around the role of a GC.
Published this month by OakBridge Publishing, the book tells the story of how the corporate legal department in India became a seat of business decision-making, and of what the job now demands of the people who hold it.
The book is written by Pramod Rao, Ritvik Lukose and Balanand Menon. Pramod Rao is a former Executive Director at the Securities and Exchange Board of India and former Group General Counsel at ICICI and Citi South Asia.
Ritvik Lukose is Co-founder and CEO of Vahura, the firm that pioneered specialised legal recruitment in India, and of Counselect, which helps legal and compliance teams increase business value through AI, extended teams, and legal operations.
Balanand Menon is a Director at Counselect, and Partner and Head of Consulting at Vahura. He has advised over 500 clients ranging from multinationals to start-ups and now directs that experience to help global corporations design, set up, and operate legal capability centres in India.
The rise the book describes tracks the transformation of Indian business itself. Liberalisation brought the multinationals, and with them a compliance burden no external firm could carry at the pace required. The regulatory landscape thickened around competition law, data protection, insolvency, and capital markets.
Cut to today, when global corporations are building legal capability centres in India, artificial intelligence is touching every part of the work, and boards are treating the General Counsel as the person who holds commercial ambition, regulatory exposure, and reputational risk in view at once.
In-House Matters draws on interviews with thirty General Counsel at multinationals, Indian conglomerates, and fast-scaling start-ups, and on the authors’ own experience on either side of the function. Across ten chapters, working through frameworks, case studies, and war stories, it moves from a lawyer’s first hundred days in the role through team building, contracts, disputes, crisis, budgets, and technology, to the point at which a General Counsel earns a seat at the table.
“Today, the General Counsel is in the room while the big calls are still live: an acquisition, a new market, a risk the company is weighing up. People still turn to the GC when a crisis breaks out, but they are also expected to shape decisions. It is a little like a footballer covering the whole length of the pitch:
Dropping back to defend your own goal one moment, getting forward to help score the next. We intend for the book to cover the whole range of this role” Pramod Rao said.
Rutvik Lukose added: “The evolution of the General Counsel is one of the most important business stories in India of the past three decades, and one of the least told. We have spent years working with organisations on legal talent and department restructuring, and we kept meeting exceptional in-house lawyers who underestimated their own reach. A General Counsel today is a business leader who happens to have trained in law. We wrote In-House Matters to give that role the handbook it deserves.”
Balanand Menon said “Most of my work with General Counsel has been centred on what it takes to build a proactive legal function: how you structure a team, what to take on, what to let go. Increasingly those questions include what to hand to technology and AI. I have watched people do this well and badly, usually with nothing to guide them. In-House Matters is the map we wanted to give them – a way through the knotty questions of people, processes, and platforms.”
