You Have To Be A Jack Of All Trades Rather Than Master Of One Says UPL GC Rohit Kumar

Mr, Kumar, would you please take our readers down memory lane and tell us about your illustrious journey

I completed my law in 2002 from Symbiosis Law School, Pune. My dad is a litigating lawyer. He doesn't practice as much now because of his advancing age but he always told me that if you want to be a corporate lawyer, you need to know how the courts function and I wanted to be a corporate lawyer, but I knew that the way to become a corporate lawyer is to understand the court system. So, I started my career as a litigation lawyer. I worked in Jaipur with a lawyer called Paras Kuhad for a year and a half. Thereafter, I think that one and a half year was pretty interesting, I did a lot of work around drafting, attending court hearings in fact, even representing certain clients and in smaller matters, where I could take the lead, or could attend or do mentioning etc, in the court. From there, I moved to Delhi to work with JSA. Some of you may know JSA is one of the largest firms in India. 

In fact, I worked with Jyoti Sagar for around 4 years and learnt in a lot of ways I continue telling him that you are my mentor in a lot of ways. So, I worked with him for around 4 years and that's when I realized that a lot of Indian lawyers in around 2007 and 2008, were moving outside or moving out of India and working with international law firms. I happened to do a backpack trip to Australia in 2007. I quite like the climate, the place and Australia doesn't come in the mind of most people for lateral movement to a law firm. Typically, Indian lawyers then and even now continue to move to jurisdictions like Singapore, Hong Kong, and London, and some in some cases where we have master's degrees from a prominent college in the US and in some cases, even US law firms, but typically these two or three jurisdictions, and when I was backpacking, I realized that Australia seems to be a nice place. It has plenty of sun unlike London, and a much pleasant weather. So, I tried and I got an offer from Herbert Smith Freehills in 2007 and moved from JSA to HSF in Melbourne. So, I moved from Delhi to Melbourne and I worked with HSF for approximately three years. And that's when I almost completed eight years of private practice and then I got a calling to switch from Private Practice.

I was not very happy with filling a timesheet, and I thought in private practice you don't control your time. So why don't I look at joining in - house. I was always clear that if I join as an in - house I want to join at the head office level not at a subsidiary level and that meant that having being an Indian qualified lawyer, I knew that I would work mostly for an Indian headquartered company, and that's when the offer from UPL came in 2010. UPL was then a much smaller company than what it is now. When I met the promoters, I quite liked their attitude. 

I had worked with large law firms until then, and you do a very defined role when you work in law firms. I remember the promoter of UPL told me that, oh, if you want to run a factory, we don't mind, you can run it and as long as you don't mess it up. I found that very refreshing. So, I took the plunge. I thought, I have a fantastic CV. I was no close to 30 years of age, and I had a reasonably good CV and I thought that if things don't go well for a year or two that's fine, i can take that setback. I can move either back to private practice or move to another in- house role. But all that is history, 

How has been your experience of working with UPL?

it's my 11th year now with UPL and UPL has grown leaps and bounds in the last 10-11 years of my stay in the company. I am the Global Head of legal for UPL and I think most people in India don't realize the length and breadth of the company I work with. So,, we are the largest company in our segment in India But it's also true that almost 90% of our revenues come from outside of India. A pretty large portion, almost 60% of our revenues come from the Americas. So, the largest country for us is Brazil and then is. the US and India. 

So, I have now had a team of 40 lawyers, of which around 20 are based out in India and around 20 lawyers are outside of India. I have 4 lawyers in the US. I have a team in Brazil, Mexico, France, Spain, South Africa, India, Dubai until recently, so I have a fairly diverse team and the team manages all of obviously UPL legal work and I'm very proud to be working for UPL because it gives a lot of freedom to people and we like empowering right from junior to senior roles. Not only in legal, company takes pride in empowering people and taking the right decisions. We like giving independence to people. So, one thing that happened with the pandemic, which all of us got stuck with last year was I think all of us realized the difference between essential, what is essential in life and what is non- essential. I think that demarcation was never as clear until we hit the pandemic. One of the lucky things, one of the good things that happened with fortitude, not by design was that I realized that I worked for an essential in the essential industry. So, even while the pandemic hit, none of our factories anywhere in the world closed even for a day. Yes, we did have issues in between, logistics and other issues, but we were because we are part of the food value chain, we sell Agro- chemicals, crop protection products, seeds. Most governments around the world realized how important we are to ensure food security globally. We got all the approvals required to go ahead and run our operations be it offices or factories. So that was that that's what I do. 

How do you see the role of inhouse lawyers and General Counsel evolving?

I think the in - house role is getting more and more interesting. I mean in my current role, I deal with lawyers around the world. We work with some of the largest law firms, we deal with, in- house teams in the US and in various parts of the world. One good thing about India's in- house team is, there is a very sharp upward trend, both in terms of quality of people it is attracting and the recognition which in- house team members are getting. I think increasingly companies are realizing that the in- house role is a pretty important role. You have to make sure that the documents which the company signs are properly vetted and the company does not take undue risk. 

I mean it comes a little easy to me because in my company since we have so much operation outside of India, and such a large exposure in the US, people tend to understand this far better in my company because now just because for people who work with US lawyers and in the US system, will understand and know that legal is a very important function. If you don't sign the right document, if you end up taking a wrong obligation, it could cost you dearly, unlike in many countries, including India where the enforcement continues to be a challenge. So, it was easier for me but I think overall I have seen in my experience of 10 and 11 years as an in- house lawyer that both the quality of people is attracting as well as the recognition with the in- house team as it receives now is markedly different than what it was even five years back and there is an upward trend as things move, the things get better in terms of in- house roles. 

Having said that, I think the downside of it is that there are more complex issues to deal with. The business team and the leadership team relies on the in- house lawyer and because the issues are getting more and more complicated and complex, you have to kind of be a jack of all trades rather master of one because your breadth of information should be vast enough to understand what gives a bigger exposure and what requires further study so that you can give the right advice to the company. 

I think one thing I've seen and that also has a downside because when I moved from private practice to in- house role, I thought, I need to keep myself abreast with the legal regime in corporate law and all the relevant laws where we get asked questions very frequently but I tried keeping myself up to date for maybe a couple of years but then I realized that is almost futile. This exercise I will never be able to complete because one, my role was so much outside of India but even in India, the way things were changing, the regime was changing, the law was changing in so many areas, it's almost impossible for an in- house person to keep yourself abreast with what's happening in all areas of law. Maybe in one particular if you're a sectoral lawyer, it's easier to keep yourself updated. But, for somebody like me, who can get asked a question about US law as much as he can get asked about Indian law and anything under law. It became an increasingly difficult task to get yourself abreast with what's happening from a legal update point of view. And that meant that we had to find the right advisors, the external advisors, that meant that you should know who are the best guys for you, they may essentially not be the best in the country, best in the city, but they have to be the best who can meet your requirements. I mean for everything we don't need to go to Harish Salve, but we need to have somebody who can give us the right answer and be available to give us the right answer. So, having your own set of external legal lawyers who you can call upon when you get stuck, became increasingly important, and I think most of my colleagues from the in- house roles will agree with that. 

The last point, which also I realized and I think is going to get more important, more and more important as we proceed is to hire good quality people and fill good teams. I think it's very important for all of us, particularly the GCs to move up the value chain. I mean, I remember when I joined or seven even 6-7-8 years back I would sit down and look at documents myself and comment and negotiate but I realize that if I end up doing this there is only so much I can do. There are so many things which I missed out because I get busy looking at the documents and I don't have extra time. 

So, I started looking at building my own team and that's when I think all of us would have done it in some ways or the other but that's again, another learning I got that you have to make sure that you come up with a good legal team, A good team under you had very good quality people and you empower them to take the right decisions so that they know when they have to reach out to you and when they can take a decision themselves, which is right for the company. So, I'll stop now. I think that's the message I wanted to give to everybody here on this platform.

Thank you so much, Rohit for sharing those thoughts with us. Since you've mentioned, the interaction between US, India and other places that you've overseen, one question on data privacy considering US has now enforced with CCPA and all other jurisdictions are also coming with their own state data privacy acts. So, how is a company like yours dealing with these things when there are several laws and when they know variations are high between those legislations? How will you deal with something like that?

I think data privacy is one part, but I think the same thing may also apply to say anti- bribery or some of the other compliance related laws there. Every country may have different requirements, but largely my experience and I think that's the right experience, if you comply with US and Europe, I think largely you are through. In data privacy, not specific to data privacy, US is behind Europe. The European data privacy law came almost three years back and it's a very forward- looking law. It's very onnerous also. I mean, I'm not a big fan of the European data, the GDPR because in fact, when it came into effect, I kept telling that it's not fair to impose the standards which Europe can have for themselves, on jurisdictions which are not as mature like India, and force Indian companies to, of course, to the extent they have European data but, and I used to give that example that, US made a big hue and cry when the copyright law got introduced in Europe because there was no copyright law in the US initially and everything which will get published and Europe would get copied in US and US or the European authors will not get anything or they even the US authors will not get anything and US was very upset when that law came in. So, I think GDPR is also one but fortunately we are not in the business of collecting data. We don't have a lot of end user data. For people I think, I mean, we are into agrochemicals we are in farming, we help farmers become more efficient globally. So, we would have some data about farmers. In fact, we were probably one of the very few companies in 2017 in anticipation of the GDPR coming into force the following year. 

We had a large project where we worked with UI. This was a global project where we went through our preparedness level on GDPR and we took the whole organization to what kind of data we have, how can we prepare ourselves and what do we need to do going forward? 

So, we did lot of that exercise in 2018 before the law came into the picture, but fortunately we are not into the business, we don't collect a lot of data. You see the enforcement typically has not been very good but, whatever enforcement has been there is more towards the digital businesses in the industry like us.