“The true value of an in-house legal team lies in its ability to anticipate risks, unlock opportunities, and shape sustainable growth trajectories.”

For Lucky Popli, Vice President Legal, Cellulosic Fibres Business at Aditya Birla Group in India, impactful legal leadership is about much more than legal expertise – it is about building trust, developing people, and creating sustainable business outcomes.

What qualities do you believe distinguish truly impactful GCs from good ones?

In my view, an impactful GC is a business leader who practices law and brings legal expertise as a strategic enabler of outcomes.

It is not just about knowing the law, but about embedding oneself into the fabric of the organisation and understanding its commercial priorities, risk appetite, and long‑term ambition. From this vantage point, the GC moves beyond identifying risks to shaping solutions, partnering closely with the business to navigate complexity while protecting enterprise value.

An impactful GC also serves as the organisation’s ethical anchor, acting as a consistent force for good, guiding decisions with integrity, sound judgment, and high emotional intelligence. They foster trust and create a culture of shared responsibility, ensuring that outcomes are not only commercially sound but also sustainable and values-driven.

Ultimately, the differentiating quality lies in the ability to translate legal insight into business impact enabling growth, preserving reputation, and confidently guiding the organisation through uncertainty with integrity and foresight.

How do you foster innovation and agility within your legal team?

As a certified Level 1 Coach, I anchor my leadership approach in a coaching mindset. I consciously move away from directive leadership towards inquiry led engagement, I focus on asking the right questions that unlock the team’s potential, thinking, creativity and ownership.

I believe innovation thrives in an environment of shared responsibility and inclusive dialogue, where the focus shifts from individual outputs to collective success. This creates the psychological safety net needed for teams to challenge assumptions, experiment, and evolve.

A key lever is actively encouraging the team to approach legal challenges through a commercial and strategic lens, ensuring that their solutions are not just legally robust, but also practical, executable, and value-accretive to the business.

Through targeted coaching, timely mentoring, and creating space for independent judgment, I aim to build a resilient and agile legal function – one that can evolve continuously, adapts, learns, and responds effectively to fast-changing business dynamics.

How do you balance the pressures of your role with personal wellbeing and resilience?

Resilience, for me is fundamentally institutional rather than individual. It stems from building a high‑trust, high‑capability team where responsibility is distributed and leadership is shared.

By investing in coaching and developing people, I ensure that the function operates with depth, continuity, and confidence, reducing dependency on any one individual and enabling sustained performance under pressure.

On a personal level, I consciously invest in continuous learning and self-development, including structured coaching frameworks. This provides perspective, clarity, and emotional balance, which are essential when navigating high‑stakes decisions.

Stepping back periodically to recalibrate enables me to remain grounded, deliberate, and composed, even in demanding situations ensuring that decision-making remains thoughtful rather than reactive.

If you could change one perception about the in-house legal profession, what would it be?

I would fundamentally shift the perception of in-house legal teams from being seen as cost centres or gatekeepers to being recognised as strategic enablers and value protectors.

When integrated effectively into the decision-making ecosystem, legal functions play a critical role in architecting pathways that are not only compliant, but also commercially optimal and reputationally resilient.

The true value of an in-house legal team lies in its ability to anticipate risks, unlock opportunities, and shape sustainable growth trajectories. At its best, the function is not a constraint it is a force multiplier for business success, ensuring that ambition is pursued with discipline, integrity, and foresight.