Peak Legal Efficiency: Siddharth Manchanda, IndusLaw Partner & Unacademy External GC

Introduction: 0:00

• Introducing Siddharth Manchanda, Partner at IndusLaw and external GC at Unacademy, India’s largest learning platform valued at 3.4 billion dollars.

Finding inspiration to practice law: 1:20

• Pursuing a career in medicine before enrolling in law school.
• Comparing the role of an associate in India and the United States.
• Entering the legal field during the transformation of the Indian economy.

Building a career in India’s tech sector during the Great Recession: 6:40

• Struggling to find an entry-level role during an economic downturn.
• An industry resurgence after micro-level shifts and a focus on building for India instead of global markets.
• Evolving within the start-up ecosystem and learning how it differs from traditional legal work.

Going in-house with Unacademy: 12:59

• Observing the potential of a client experiencing hypergrowth and taking the opportunity to work with trustworthy founders.
• Explaining Unacademy, India’s largest learning platform.
• Democratizing education by offering online entrance exam preparation anywhere in the country.

Key learnings from a first in-house GC role: 17:13

• Learning and unlearning legal lessons as you work at 100x speed.
• Not going all in from a legal standpoint from day one in order to allow the business team to experiment.
• Viewing the business situation from a lens of pragmatism.
• Presenting your point-of-view to leaders with crystal clarity.

Considering the perception of legal within your organization: 22:21

• Struggling to measure your legal team’s output in a way that proves success.
• Developing strategies to assist the core business function, make contracts better, and reduce complaints.
• Looking to tech to find methods for drafting, executing, managing, and analyzing around 1000 new contracts a month.
• Analyzing problem statements to develop effective and efficient SOPs.

Reflecting on the early days at Unacademy: 28:32

• Shifting your team’s mindset away from traditional training to accept tech solutions.
• Understanding that repetitive and manual tasks prevent lawyers from exercising their strongest skills.
• Demonstrating speed and efficiency to prove the advantages of tech and AI in contract management.

Marketing reduced contract drafting time internally: 36:32

• Emphasizing that time saved is time invested elsewhere.

Predicting the future of legal tech: 39:14

• Finding ways to analyze the bottomless wells of data that firms already have.
• Fighting back against resistance to change in traditional lawyering. 
• Asking how tech can increase your efficiency at a fraction of the cost.

Using tech experience to change the way you deal with clients: 46:39

• Empathizing with clients through a shared understanding of business perspectives.
• Asking informed questions so that clients know you appreciate their concerns.

Balancing a GC role with a law firm partnership: 49:51

• Appreciating both sides of the legal equation in simultaneous in-house and client services roles.
• Leaning on tech solutions to multi-task and becoming a slave to your calendar.

Advice to companies looking to enter the Indian market: 52:27

• Focusing on what Indian consumers want instead of duplicating what has worked in other countries.
• Keying into the right metric and Indian sentiment to guarantee success.

What you wish you’d know as a young lawyer: 59:00

• Recognizing the importance of soft skills like stakeholder management and learning from clients.