Raja Sengupta, General Counsel, TRDP Group, VCherish Labs in India, discusses how Legal can move beyond managing legal work to shaping business decisions – knowing when to intervene, where judgement adds value and how to develop lawyers who can make those decisions with confidence.
How do you ensure Legal is involved early enough in important business decisions?
I do not think early involvement comes from a policy that simply says, “consult Legal”. It comes from demonstrating where Legal can add value and making that engagement useful.
My rule is straightforward. If a decision materially changes the market we enter, the money we commit, the data we use, the people we affect, or the reputation we put at stake, early Legal involvement can add value while the options are still open.
For me, the responsibility is on Legal to make that involvement valuable. We need to be responsive, understand the commercial context and offer a clear view with practical options, not simply identify issues.
I use “market, money, data, people and reputation” as a simple five-trigger test. It helps Legal identify where an early legal perspective may add value, without requiring Legal to attend every meeting.
What is the most effective change you have made to the way your legal function operates?
The most effective change has been recognising that different matters require different levels of legal intervention. Repeatable work can move efficiently through standard positions, playbooks and established processes. This allows legal judgment to focus where it can add the greatest value.
The change is not only operational. It has also strengthened ownership within the team and made Legal more responsive. Lawyers have greater responsibility, responses are quicker, and senior legal attention is focused on matters where experience and judgment can contribute most.
In simple terms, we have moved from managing a queue of legal work to managing the flow of business decisions.
What is the biggest mistake law firms make when trying to build relationships with General Counsel?
The biggest mistake is confusing visibility with usefulness. A GC does not need another generic update or relationship call. We need external counsel who remember the business, understand our risk appetite, and know how decisions are actually made.
The best firms reduce our internal workload. They bring the issue, the realistic options, the trade-offs, and a view on what they would do. If every new matter requires my team to brief the firm again from zero, we may have a supplier relationship, but we have not yet built a genuinely valuable one.
Where is AI currently creating the greatest practical value within your legal team?
AI creates the greatest practical value in high-volume, information-intensive and verifiable legal work. We use it for legal research, summarising lengthy records, semantic search, litigation intelligence, regulatory monitoring and knowledge retrieval. AI can process large datasets, identify patterns and surface relevant information faster. This reduces manual searching and first-pass analysis.
The real value is augmentation, not replacement. It gives us more time for legal reasoning, strategy, negotiation and decision-making.
We follow a human-in-the-loop approach. AI outputs are not treated as legal conclusions. We verify the sources and reasoning. We also remain conscious of hallucination risk, bias, incomplete retrieval and explainability limitations.
For novel or high-stakes matters, we apply a higher level of human oversight. The legal team retains accountability for the final legal judgment. My principle is simple: AI can shorten the route to legal judgment. It cannot assume responsibility for that judgment.
How do you balance protecting the organisation with helping the business move quickly?
I do not see protection and speed as opposing objectives. The key is to understand the nature and materiality of the risk, consider it in the context of the business objective, and identify appropriate safeguards.
Legal’s role is to bring clarity to that process. We help assess the risk, identify practical options and find a workable path forward. The focus is on enabling informed and proportionate decision-making.
Good legal judgment is not about eliminating every risk. Business naturally involves risk. The role of Legal is to help the organisation understand that risk, manage it appropriately and pursue its objectives with confidence.
How do you develop lawyers in your team into future legal leaders?
I try to develop lawyers for the environment they will have to lead in, not simply for the legal problems we face today. In a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world, technical expertise is essential. But it is no longer sufficient. Future legal leaders need judgment, adaptability, commercial awareness and influence. They must be comfortable where there is no obvious legal answer.
I believe lawyers need enterprise experience, not just increasingly complex legal work. I encourage the team to own matters end to end. They work closely with commercial, finance, operations and other functions. They understand different perspectives and business objectives. They form a view and make a recommendation before escalating. They also stay connected after the advice is given. Judgment develops from giving advice and seeing its consequences.
I also bring behavioural science into legal development. Lawyers need to understand how decisions are actually made. Framing, incentives, cognitive biases, risk perception and organisational dynamics all matter. A technically correct legal answer has greater value when it also helps improve decision-making.
Equally important is a culture of ownership, responsiveness and passion. Working in a global organisation brings both opportunity and responsibility. Legal teams support businesses across markets, jurisdictions and time zones. At times, that means being available beyond conventional working hours. I see that as part of staying connected, being dependable and supporting shared objectives when it matters most.
It also requires collaboration across functions and collective ownership of outcomes. This is how Legal becomes a trusted and dependable business partner.
Ultimately, I see legal leadership as a form of decision architecture. Future legal leaders must bring clarity to ambiguity. They must bring constructive challenges where appropriate and connect legal risk with enterprise objectives.
For me, the real test of leadership is whether the team can exercise that judgment consistently, with ownership and confidence, even when the GC is not in the room.
What do you know now that you wish you had known when you first moved in-house?
I wish I had understood earlier how fundamentally different the in-house role is from private practice. It requires a different mindset. You are not only advising on the law. You are part of the organisation and its decision-making environment.
The legal answer is one part of a broader business decision. Context, timing, commercial objectives and trust matter alongside technical precision.
Over time, I learned to understand the business more deeply. How it creates value. How decisions are made. What matters commercially. And where Legal can contribute most effectively.
I also learned that timing is part of good legal judgment. A clear and proportionate answer while options are still open can be more valuable than a technically perfect answer that comes too late.
The biggest shift was understanding that an in-house lawyer should not simply identify legal risk. The role is to translate legal risk into practical choices and help the organisation move forward with clarity and confidence.
