In-House Matters: A Complete Handbook for the Modern General Counsel, published this month by OakBridge Publishing, 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.
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New book shows how the company lawyer became a business leader
The book is written by Pramod Rao, formerly Group General Counsel at ICICI and Citi South Asia and later an Executive Director at the Securities and Exchange Board of India, and by Ritvik Lukose and Balanand Menon, who have spent more than fifteen years advising corporate legal departments on talent, technology, and workflow through Vahura and Counselect.
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.
Rao says: “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.”
Lukose adds: “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.”
Alongside that story, the book is also a practical guide to how a legal department is designed and run.
Menon says: “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.”
In-House Matters launches with invitation-only evenings in Mumbai (23 July), Bengaluru (12 August), and Delhi (7 September). Each gathers around 200 board members, C-suite executives, and General Counsel, and pairs a panel discussion with the three authors on the opportunities and challenges of the in-house role today with an extended hour of conversation.
In-House Matters has drawn praise from some of India’s most distinguished corporate, regulatory, and academic voices.
“For every company builder.”
– Nandan Nilekani, Co-founder and Chairman, Infosys; Founding Chairman, UIDAI (Aadhaar)
“At its heart, this is a book about leadership, institution-building, and the evolving role of the General Counsel in shaping both.”
– Amitabh Kant, Former G20 Sherpa, Government of India; Former CEO, NITI Aayog
“Authoritative and lucid.”
– K.V. Kamath, Chairman, Jio Financial Services; Founding President, New Development Bank (BRICS Bank)
“A no-nonsense, jargon-free playbook for the modern General Counsel.”
– Justice B.N. Srikrishna, Former Judge of the Supreme Court of India
“The first book I’ve seen that really gives the role the seriousness it deserves.”
– Keki Mistry, Interim Chairman, HDFC Bank; Former Vice Chairman & CEO, HDFC Ltd
“An insightful guide to the General Counsel’s journey from compliance guardian to business strategist.”
– U.K. Sinha, Former Chairman, SEBI
“A book about a role that opens paths for a new generation of leaders, women prominent among them.”
– Anita George, CEO, ProsperETE; Independent Director, Tata Sons
“A compelling case for the General Counsel as the linchpin of the corporate management framework.”
– Umakanth Varottil, Professor of Corporate Law, National University of Singapore