New book charts the rise of India’s General Counsel

"In-House Matters: A Complete Handbook for the Modern General Counsel", published this month by OakBridge Publishing, is the first full account of how the corporate legal department in India became a seat of business decision-making.

It is also a practical guide for the General Counsel with a department to remake, for the lawyer who aspires to the role, and for the business leader looking to tap into the full potential of their legal team.

The book is written by Pramod Rao, Ritvik Lukose, and Balanand Menon.

Rao served as Group General Counsel at ICICI and General Counsel for Citi’s South Asia cluster, and later as an Executive Director at SEBI. Lukose and Menon advise legal departments on talent, technology, and workflow through Vahura and Counselect.

Much of what brings In-House Matters alive comes from the field. It features quotes from interviews with thirty General Counsel across multinational corporations, private conglomerates, and fast-growing start-ups, and their voices carry through the themed chapters. A first hundred days spent resisting the urge to fix everything at once, building a team and keeping it, a crisis amplified by social media: anecdotes around these are recounted firsthand, and they give the book’s frameworks their weight.

“For years, the Indian General Counsel had to read about the job in translation,” said Rao. “The case studies were American, the playbooks European. Building a law firm or a chamber practice has been richly chronicled, but the corporate counsel who generate much of that work have gone largely unwritten about. That gap is what we set out to close.”

Lukose points to how much further the role of General Counsel can go. “What struck us again and again is how often very good in-house lawyers underestimate their own reach. They see the job through the lens of the job description, when they’re already sitting at the centre of the business. We wrote this for the lawyer who wants to take on more of what the role can be.”

Menon frames the shift as an opening. “You can actively design a legal department now. AI is already changing how contracts get reviewed and how teams are built. The General Counsel who is curious about these tools can find the executive backing to put them to work usefully. The most effective GCs treat technology and workflow as a core part of what they do.”

The book launches with invitation-only evenings in Mumbai on 23 July, Bengaluru on 12 August, and Delhi on 7 September, each bringing together around 200 board members, C-suite executives, General Counsel, and those on the path to such roles. The three authors, along with business leaders and other senior lawyers, will discuss the opportunities and challenges of the in-house role today.

In-House Matters is available to pre-order here. 

More on the topics related to the book – including templates and tools – will be at inhousematters.com. For excerpts, outtakes, and event updates, you can follow the book’s LinkedIn page.