Insights

At the Dravid-Padukone Centre for Sports Excellence, a campus where athletes like P.V. Sindhu and Lakshya Sen train to become world champions, we concretised our commitment to create a future where Business Legal is the standard approach.

Counselect began in 2019, with the ambition of transforming the way legal departments work through flexi-talent solutions. The ambit has expanded many-fold since then to cover technology, process and legal operations, culminating in the formal launch of our integrated solutions in June 2024.

In the year since Counselect 2.0, we’ve continued to have compelling conversations with CLOs, GCs, CFOs, CTOs and CEOs. It’s clear that Business and Legal can’t afford to run on parallel tracks any longer. Legal must adopt the growth mindset of Business, looking at protection and progress as complementary. As Mark A. Cohen put it in a Forbes column in December 2021, “legal transformation is a business story.”

Legal must speak a more direct language, the language of Business. It should concern itself with the questions of Business. How can the department increase the gap between its costs and the company’s revenues? How can it not only save money but also make money? At Counselect, we think about how we can help legal departments undertake this mindset shift. We do this by shifting the conversation to “Business Legal”, by looking at risks and seeing opportunities, by going from a function-led approach to an area-led one.

We’ve always taken pride in being challengers, in asking questions and scoping possibilities. We decided it’s time to articulate this approach into our purpose, our North Star, something that ignites us and propels us forward. That’s the back story for the Purpose we unveiled at the offsite: Unlocking the opportunities that risks conceals.

While our Purpose gives us a definitive direction, our Vision provides us with the first pitstop. It may sound audacious but our Vision is to help Business Legal become a coveted architect of the organisation’s sustainable growth. What this means is that we want Legal departments to function like elite business units, to think of growth when they think of risk. We think of the General Counsel not only as someone who puts out today’s fires, but as someone who can harness tech, data and intelligence to create sensors that spotlight tomorrow’s business opportunities and predict future risks.

Our Purpose and Vision won’t remain confined to a slide deck. Every individual at Counselect is already bringing it alive on a daily basis. This was on ample display at the off-site—in the vigour with which teams battled it out on the cricket pitch, in the spirit with which they cheered each other on the football turf, in the alacrity with which they took ownership when the OKRs were showcased.

The offsite also served as the culmination of several other milestones: our six-year anniversary, the integration of the team from Lawmetrik (a consulting and managed services company we acquired earlier this year), our collaborations with fantastic organisations like Co.labx, Bizsherpa.ai and Agami.

It’s going to be an action-packed few months for us, and we’re raring to go. At a Strength and Conditioning session at the offsite, Coach Sahil exhorted our troop to get into the “athletic stance” before starting a new set of exercises. It meant tightening the core, focussing straight ahead, getting battle ready. The phrase caught on like wildfire. Clarion calls of “Athletic Stance!” echoed off the walls of the badminton hall where, every other day, some of India’s brightest hopes prepare to rewrite the sporting trajectory of the nation.

We at Counselect are in our “athletic stance”. We know what we’re proposing may be exciting to some and risky to others. But that is what drives us: the sheer scale and diversity of the problem we are working on. And the brilliant legal and business minds we get to jam with.

It’s time to play!