We could have done a lot to prepare for legal market liberalisation, but we're not there: Wipro GC Tejal Patil

I was at Wadia Ghandy & Co for a long time in Mumbai, then I went to Bangalore. I even did a stint with a customs lawyer there. Then when I moved to the US, I got pregnant, I had no job. When I came back to Singapore, at the time, I was looking for a job. I wasn't really finding anything. One fine day, I just was having dinner with someone. He told me needed a contract employee for six months, because his General Counsel was leaving. I actually ended up getting his role. So, it was totally by chance that I joined GE, and started as an in-house counsel.

In India, it has evolved, but when I joined General Electric in Singapore as the Asia-Pacific lawyer, it was one of the companies that really valued its legal talent. The lawyer always had a seat at the table; maybe it was an American company concept at the time. When I joined, the lawyer was everything - the trusted advisor, the business enabler and the compliance head. That is the current state of GCs in India today, but it was always the case for American companies.

What I also see is that the GCs in India, in the past, would be company secretaries or finance folks who had a very deep knowledge of the business. Now you have people coming in with a deeper knowledge of the law, who are also learning about business. I think it's a different kind of convergence that's taking place. Also, the GCs today are venturing into non-core law areas, beyond litigation, beyond M&A. A lot of GCs I know are head of facilities or head of ESG. They're really moving beyond the traditional concepts. Everything has got some foot in policy or regulation. There are a lot of changes and it's a continuously evolving role, because it's all about the value that you add to the organisation.

Yes. I think anyone who says that they didn't have any challenges is not being upfront. Again, being in an American company was very different. If I was in India at the time, maybe it would have been different. Even in that context, when I came back to India in 2012, dealing with customers or vendors was a challenge because that external environment is very male-dominated.

I remember I was negotiating a contract and my CEO was sitting next to me and they would keep looking at him for the answer and he had to keep directing them back to me. That happened as late as almost 2018. For a woman, it is not easy to be in the profession. It is intellectually demanding, it's time consuming, it's stressful. In-house is a lot easier, I feel. That's why we see a lot of diversity in in-house teams. A lot of women opt for in-house roles because they find it to be a more structured environment, a safer environment, a more respectful environment. I'm finding a lot of women now in-house, almost skewed to a majority in many companies. All my direct reports in GE - most of them were women and all of them are big GCs in India today. I think in-house has been kind for women.

Law has become like a basic Bachelor's degree now. It's equivalent to a BA or a BCom. You'll find a lot of people who traditionally would not have done law are doing law, especially women. Intake has increased. I think women have tended to be far more studious, in terms of reading, attention spans, etc. So law has suited women in that sense. And so law schools, companies, even the profession, has a lot more women. I see a lot more women in litigation today, but not enough at the top, because people fall off and they fall off for many reasons.

But that's in general. Is it starker in law? Not in in-house. Because all the functions in a company always have more women. Diversity ratios in most companies are made up by the women in the functions - whether it's HR, finance or legal.

But litigation in our country is difficult. If you know about your brief at six o'clock in the evening, and you have to read it and go in the next day, it's difficult. If you have to file something overnight, it's difficult. In more developed jurisdictions, it's not that difficult. Your life is so much more structured. I find a lot more women can come in here if our system organises itself better.

I think the last count was about 145 people. It's very interesting because when you talked about the evolution of General Counsel, my team now doesn't just have lawyers. It has lawyers, it has compliance folks who are not lawyers, it has data privacy folks, intellectual property folks government affairs, litigation, artificial intelligence governance. So it's very interesting that the teams are now not only lawyers. General Counsel are now leading teams that are not only lawyers which is a huge change.

For freshers and for junior folks, I'm really looking at the ability to learn. Attitude is everything at that stage. When I look for senior lawyers, it's leadership. The ability to go beyond your existing job. Can you actually rise to the occasion? Can you actually solve a problem? And that's something I think many people struggle with. They'll give you the advice, but they can't solve the problem.

Bad answer for law firms. Very little is outsourced, but that's partly because of the nature of the industry. We're not heavily regulated. Most of our work is contracting, labour employment, M&A. So we try to do a lot of it in-house. The size of the legal teams in most IT services companies is large because most of the legal work is done in-house.

I've created a committee of senior lawyers. We evaluate the law firms as a group. Even if one person has not been responsive to anyone in this group, or if there's been a bad experience, then it won't matter whether you know them really well or someone knows them really well, we won't use them.

We really evaluate the services, the responsiveness, the practicality of the advice and the expertise. When you're in-house, you know your basic laws. You are going for that edge, that particular nuance. You want that person to really know their stuff. So there's a lot of debate around what we use, who we use, and that's really how we choose them. Not from a "I used to work in this law firm and therefore we should use this law firm" standpoint. It's a collective decision and that really adds a lot of accountability. It also adds a lot of ethics into the choice.

We're doing some really cool stuff. Right now, we've developed a tool in-house which will review our contracts and it will analyse all our key clauses. For example, how many clauses have force majeure. It will pull out all the clauses in contracts in the system with a live force majeure clause which you can review. It's called Smart Contract Analyzer.

Another thing we've built in-house is Intelligent Contracting. When junior lawyers are marking up a contract, they want to look at either a standard contract or a past position. We have this tool built-in with AI where if you're reviewing a contract, you can actually side-by-side review it against the standard, and know what the deviations are so you can mark up the contract.

Now we're in the process of acquiring another tool that actually does the redlining for us, which is DraftPilot. It literally takes your standard, takes your new word contract, and redlines it.

We're also toying with a couple of tools where we can analyse the risk of a contract. So when you actually look at a contract and you review it, you say, is this a high-risk contract? Is it a medium-risk contract? Which areas are high-risk? We've done a lot of work around contracting because contracting is the bulk of our work.

I'm a firm believer that you only use AI where you're actually getting productivity, not because it's just cool to do. There has to be a real tangible benefit to your team in using these tools. We're really looking at how our lawyers cut time in doing the basic stuff and then use that time to look at the overall risk of a contract, to review the business strategy behind the contract, so that they really become risk lawyers and not scribes.

Most of the AI tools that have been developed are in-house except one that we are acquiring. That's really interesting because our lawyers are spending time designing it along with the IT team. The lawyers are actually telling them - this is how I work every day, so you tell me how we can do this, instead of buying an off-the-shelf product. That's also helping them change their views about using it, because lawyers resist technology because they think, "I'm a smarter lawyer. AI doesn't know anything. I don't need this. I can do it faster."

But then you miss things. I keep telling them that humility is the most important thing when you're using AI, because you have to take that into account that you have to learn something totally new. We're really enjoying doing that.

Right now, a lot of the foreign firms are using it. So we always have these conversations. But I think a lot of firms are still in very nascent stages. They might claim differently, but it's all very young right now. It's more about them improving their own productivity, their own quality. The benefits are not passing to clients yet.

While we have the discussions and we're interested to see what people are using, I think there's still a way to go before it translates to a client benefit.

I think we are only 30-40% of the way. There's a lot of development, but because we're developing the tools ourselves, we know the gaps in them also - how much they can do and can't do. I think we won't hire less, but we will definitely change the mix of what we hire. I'm not seeing numbers come down significantly, but the type of lawyers will change, seniorities will change and I also think that quality will improve substantially across the board.

So what AI has an ability to do is it brings the junior lawyers or the inexperienced lawyers really fast up the curve. The senior lawyers are able to find the flaws in the system. I think it's the lawyers in between who need to change mindset and scale up very differently. So we will see a change in the mix. By and large, for a country like India, I think it's going to be amazing because it's generally going to bring up the quality of lawyering in the country.

I love the fact that it democratises this profession for the common man.

I have always been on the side of reciprocity, but subject to that, I think Indian lawyers and law firms had the opportunity for years to really scale up and to really improve their services. I don't think we have reached there, to internationalise the way we should have. Therefore, there has become that need for foreign law firms or foreign lawyers to come in. Indian firms that go outside use them anyway. So it doesn't really make a difference whether they're sitting in Delhi or they're sitting in London or they're sitting elsewhere. They will definitely help improve the quality of the legal system. That's the way I'm looking at it from a broader picture. We could have done a lot ourselves, but we're not there.

Though given where we are today, there's still a lot of apprehension in foreign law firms. They're all still testing the waters. What does this really mean? Should I really invest? Will I get thrown out tomorrow? So it'll take some time.

International law firms have two advantages. I'm going to compare only UK and US, not the rest of the world. Their drafting is way better than ours, their research is way better than ours. The time and attention they pay to single matters for depth - because we do so many - is way better.

Indian law firms and Indian lawyers are fantastic at finding practical solutions. They are strategists. They will find you a way out. They are lateral-thinking, they think out of a box. That's not what I have found outside. So it really depends on the kind of matter you have. They have very different skills.

There's a lot of legal reform required in this country. As an in-house counsel, I see it from a client's standpoint.

Number one - litigation needs to be rehauled completely. We cannot be waiting for 10 to 20 years for matters to be heard.

The second aspect is cost. The cost of quality legal services has gone up considerably, and not just for a normal litigant. Even for companies, these costs are getting prohibitive.

The third thing I would say is that alternate dispute resolution in the country has not taken off the way it should have. The tribunals are not as effective as it should be.

Fourthly, ethics in the profession. In my entire career, I've stood by a foundation of ethics. This is what I teach every new batch of lawyers that joins my team. We cannot compromise on ethics.

So first of all, I think because it's global in nature, it's a long day. It starts in the morning with India and then Europe and then the US, but I have very experienced teams. I spend most of my time looking at what I call "beyond the day" job. I'm known to do larger projects. I like solving the bigger problems. The day-to-day advice, etc, the team looks at.

An interesting project that we did in the last two years was we revamped every single policy in the company and we found that we had 4,000 artifacts that had to be looked at and distilled down to 300 simplified, easy to understand policies for 65 countries in the world. I tend to take on a lot more of these cross-functional, big impact projects. So a lot of the time goes on that. I do a lot of feedback sessions because I just feel like people can really grow. A lot of my time goes in telling people what they can do differently, how they can be. My biggest joy is if my junior folks grow.

We're all online now. Quite a few of the big questions even get answered on our team's chat. It's much easier to do that. Spend quarter ends on board presentations. So it's pretty much more around risk, around mentoring, around large impact projects.