Google in-houser Sheetal Sawhney Kapur has joined Netflix’s rapidly growing in-house team in India as senior counsel and director legal.

She will succeed Ashish Chandra in the role, who had left Netflix in May to join WhatsApp.

When contacted, she confirmed that she would join on 2 September, and said that her role would include lead business partnerships and transactions.

This would exclude a remit over content and intellectual property (IP), which are verticals that operate semi-independently of each other at Netflix.

The content streaming player had recently expanded its in-house legal function with senior hires into both those verticals:

• Nishith Desai Associates (NDA) leader Kartik Maheshwari, whom we had reported in June to be joining its legal team to head up content-related issues, and
• Balaji Telefilms’ vice president legal Priyanka Chaudhari, who had joined in May as director and senior counsel in the India intellectual property vertical.

Kapur, a 2008 ILS Pune LLB, who holds a 2010-LLM from the University of Melbourne, had joined Google India’s legal team in 2017 from PayU.

At Google India, she was handling the legal work relating to the internet giant’s work in the online payments and fintech field.

She left employment at Google in January 2019 and had operated as a senior consultant for Google since then on similar issues.

Before joining PayU in 2013, she had been at J Sagar Associates (JSA) from 2011, and international firm Fasken Martineau duMoulin from 2010.