India’s general counsel are moving from the back office to the frontlines, standing watch over a business landscape reshaped by data, cyber and AI risk. Legal department leaders say the job is no longer just to prevent missteps, but to build the guardrails that let companies move faster without losing control.
India’s general counsel are navigating a changed legal landscape. Three regulatory shifts — the Digital Personal Data Protection framework, stricter CERT-In breach reporting rules, and emerging AI governance requirements — have landed at the same time, forcing in-house legal teams to act faster and earlier than before.
For Panduranga Acharya, general counsel at Zepto, the old model no longer holds. “Gone are the days when legal was just a reactive, tick-box compliance function,” he says. “The in-house counsel role has evolved into proactive techno-legal risk management.”
That shift has practical consequences for how legal teams work with the business. “Today, we cannot simply say ‘no’ to our business teams; rather, through a rigorous, fact-based analysis of the applicable law, we must enable them to explore all growth possibilities with proper guardrails in place…
