Yadav said: “I believe the LPO sector represents a different way of doing things, by which I mean to say that it is both innovative and disruptive to the way we generally understand legal services and solutions being delivered in the past.

“I made the switch to be part of this new paradigm, and I hope I can add some value to the way in-house lawyers perceive the work that LPOs do.”

Most lawyers were averse to using the services of LPOs to address their clients’ customised needs but, he explained, for standardised client needs LPOs were more effective. Most in-house lawyers didn’t understand this because they lacked exposure to the LPO model of work, and also because law firms are not used to a “systematic and process-oriented” way of working.

“I could not let go of the chance to do something really meaningful and satisfying,” he added.

Yadav began his legal career in 1996 as legal head at the non-banking finance company VLS Finance for more than a year and moved to Kochhar & Co in Delhi, and then Japanese intellectual property (IPR) law firm TMI Associates in Tokyo.

In December 2000 he returned in-house as the South Asia regional counsel for Sun Microsystems, and moved to IBM as senior attorney in July 2004. In May 2007 Yadav began at Cisco Systems as senior corporate counsel and finally moved to his last-held in-house role, at Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) in January 2009 as head of the global professional services legal function.

At NSN, Yadav said, he worked with LPOs as part of his most recent assignment in the contracting and IPR space and it was challenging to understand their model, especially when many LPOs “showed a lack of focus”, claiming to help his company with absolutely anything that it wanted.

There was also often a failure on the LPOs’ part to understand his company’s business model and “pain points”, and therefore the absence of a clear plan, he claimed.

At UnitedLex Yadav will focus on providing direction to the team for designing and implementing effective contracting solutions through new services, better processes and more efficient technology, for both existing and new clients, as well as increasing people and delivery capabilities, according to a press release from the company.

UnitedLex’s global chief operating officer Pavan Vaish described Yadav’s appointment as “a strong addition to the UnitedLex leadership team”.

UnitedLex reported a sixteen-fold turnover growth since 2008, grossing Rs 238 crore in 2011. The LPO employs 550 lawyers globally, more than two-thirds of whom are in India.