In Conversation with Meena Lall, Chief Legal & Compliance Officer, Tata Steel Ltd

Many Congratulations on featuring in BW Legal World’s General Counsel 100 list for the year 2020. We’d love to know about your journey so far, most memorable experiences, and your thoughts on receiving this Award. 

The information regarding the award came to me as an absolute surprise, indeed a pleasant one. In fact, I did not imagine any such covet for myself. The news made me super happy and I now had another story to tell!

What do you attribute your success to? What would you say has helped you emerge as a top General Counsel in your industry?

My success can never be mine alone. I share it with my ever-supportive husband and family at the fore. It has been a pure privilege to have interacted with few outstanding Senior Counsels and peer legal practitioners, which has always enabled me to push my thinking to richer levels. The trust, faith, confidence reposed in me and the liberty provided to me by the Management of my Company is unparallel and has done wonders to me as a professional.

What advice would you have for others who want to set off in a similar direction? 

If someone is keen to try their hand at the role of an in-house counsel, my mantra for them is to CO-CREATE. At the outset, become a practising counsel within your company i.e. In your internal interactions with your fellow colleagues, who come with a legal issue at hand, do the adequate reasoning with them, which will facilitate the preparation of a focussed brief for the court, the opposite party or your arguing counsel or set up a sound strategy for negotiating a deal. Believe me such interactions will give insights to your internal customers about ‘when’ to approach their Legal officers. Focus your interactions, to co-create a way forward.

At the next level, the solution in the external world needs to be co-created with the practitioners/consultants, law firms. At this stage, you ought to become a modest client and give suggestions.

Would you please share with our readers the array of work you handle at your organization? What is your in-house team size, and would you please allow us a little peek into your routine at work?

Well, my fundamental choice at Legal work is litigation, where I had started my journey in life before joining the corporate. During my early days at the Company, I handled a lot of civil litigation and enjoyed my stint at the Code of Civil Procedure and associated procedural laws. Eventually, my task size in all respects increased, as in I got to handle the complex issues related to forests, mining, labour, environment, competition, etc. While at this, I enjoyed drafting a few transactions also, which came my way. Presently, I have been privileged to be allowed to contribute to legal work of varied areas of law and across all levels of the requirement of a corporate. This makes for a blend of horizontal and vertical growth.

As for the team, we have a robust team of subject matter experts, which comes in handy for all our issues. Also, my routine at work involves the drafting of notes for internal advisories, attending meetings, participating in brainstorming sessions, etc. I also handled compliance at one stage.

What have been your key learnings as the legal gatekeepers of your company from the year past and what are your predictions for the future?

Prior to the onset of the pandemic, we did not imagine life without paper. We have lived life on preparing the briefs through ‘post-it’. As a legal community, we must quickly develop the agility to completely do away or at least minimise the use of paper in our offices. This brings in multiple win-win aspects, arrest forest depletion, reduce dependence on such heavy records besides acceleration in the speed of justice. In my view, the transformation has begun and will now continue. There can be some transformational irritants, but that’s part of any change.

From this point of view, the first thing that as an in-house team we picked up is to work with soft copies. Secondly, we are sharpening our understanding of the legal framework on data and information security laws.

Any significant legislation or decision of the top court that has been a welcome change or has been rather mistimed in your opinion. 

I am a keen follower of the judgments, in particular of the Supreme Court. In the recent past, a few judgments on some very important and complex issues arising from the industry have been wonderfully written. Law has been expounded in judgments written like a treatise.  Aside from this, the judgments of the recent past (Babita Puniya line of judgments) driving equality in social fabric on all aspects are a great contributor to reforming the social beliefs.

An experience, matter or person that left a lasting impression on you.

Indeed many! Just one that I would wish to amusingly recount is an incident about fifteen years ago. We were consulting a Sr Counsel on a complex issue, which was a lifeline feeder for my company. I was quite confident about the preparation that I had done with documents, facts and everything. While the Counsel looked at that, but himself took time and effort over several hours to practically dictate the entire list of dates himself for laying the facts in minutest details. That incident helped me appreciate the value of the smallest detail of the issue that may otherwise be considered ignorable. An amazing learning event!

What keeps you busy when you’re not working? Any favourite book or movie/series that you'd like to recommend to our readers.

I am a homebound person, can spend time endlessly doing things at home. My time spend is a combination of reading, thinking, writing or listening to Indian classical music.  I have enjoyed reading ‘A New Earth’ by Eckhart Tolle and ‘I am Krishna’ of Deep Trivedi.