In-house counsel

Essar Group general counsel (GC) Hemant Kumar has resigned to Larsen &Toubro as its group general counsel, reported the Economic Times:

Kolte Patil Developers group general counsel Vidya Adsule has joined the JP Infra group as its general counsel.

The answer may be that it’s complicated and that there’s no silver bullet: a wide swath of factors matter (and don’t matter) in selecting lawyers by in-house counsel, revealed a survey of 65 general counsel (GCs) and senior legal managers by event management company IDEX Legal and information provider Thomson Reuters.

Law firms may lose company referral business if the predictions of general counsel (GC) surveyed by IDEX Legal and Thomson Reuters, come true. Law firm fee currently eats up more than one-third of the in house legal budget of the GCs companies.

Cognizant Technology Solutions Asia Pacific (APAC) region general counsel GV Anand Bhushan has quit the company to move to another company as in house counsel.

Deutsche Bank India senior legal counsel Sapna Bhawnani will join Credit Suisse in Mumbai as its joint director and co-head of legal India in the coming months.

Freshly minted Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas partner Himanshu Dodeja will join private equity major Blackstone as its India general counsel (GC).

The ex-general counsel (GC) of UTV-founder Ronnie Screwvala’s fund Unilazer Ventures, Archana Rajaram, left the company to go independent this month, now advising the venture capital funds Unilazer Ventures, IDG Ventures and Matrix Partners and others as an independent general counsel.

IBM Singapore head of legal Kapil Chaudhary joined Autodesk as its India and SAARC general counsel, replacing Mekhla Basu who joined IBM.

Former Hammurabi & Solomon partner Vidya Adsule joined Pune real estate builder Kolte Patil Developers as its group general counsel.

J Sagar Associates (JSA) Mumbai partner Nandini Mehta left the firm to join realty portal Housing.com as its general counsel, reported Money Control and several others further to a company press release.

Flipkart has hired Samsung’s former director and general counsel South and West Asia, Rajinder Sharma, as its group general counsel, while the company has been busy restructuring its operations with its recent buy-back of its logistics operations from WS Retail Services Pvt Ltd as reported by Mint on Tuesday (22 September).

R Sunder Rajan, the former chief of legal at GMR, has joined Bharti Airtel as its group general counsel (GC).

When 28 years after its birth, India’s most-diversified financial institution that’s not a bank, Bajaj Finance, looked inward, it realised it was short of a legal team comparable to the company’s overall size and rate of diversification. The company’s legal department was understaffed: a total of six in-house lawyers present to handle the documentation and litigation arising out of a portfolio of 11 non-banking financing (NBFC) businesses.

Read how the company hired Sapan Gupta from Standard Chartered and began its facelift.

Legal recruiter Vahura said that general counsel (GC) with between 15 to 25 years of experience, working at companies, could earn from Rs 80 lakh to more than Rs 300 lakh per year as a cost-to-company (CTC) package.

Phoenix Legal Mumbai partner Kartikeya Singh is understood to join investment bank Bank of America (BoA) Merrill Lynch in August as its deputy general counsel (GC) India.