Rachita Maker

Title:  Vice President - Legal Operations

Company: Tata Communications

How did you get into legal operations? 

I joined Tata Communications about 8 months ago as head of legal operations. Before that, I have about 20 years of experience working with clients in the space. A lot of what I did helped me build to this career. I worked with clients ranging from telecommunications to banking and finance, helath care, etc. I worked with general counsel for all these industries helping them with complex legal problems and helping provide solutions. Whether it was working on contract management or working in litigation and e-discovery, everything helped me build into this role. I have always had a mind that driven to process, project management, technology, efficiency, and productivity which is everything we are looking for in legal operations person. My entire career has helped me build into this role.

When and why did you join CLOC? 

I just joined CLOC right after I joined Tata Communications in this role as Global Head of Legal Operations. It was a very natural thing to do because if I was going to be the head of legal operations in a large company, I needed to learn from my peers and have a community to reach out to when I have a problem. I needed access to information and experiences from other people. It was the first thing I did during my first week at Tata Communications.

What has been your biggest legal ops challenge and how did you overcome it?

I think everyday is a new challenge. Managing the finance and legal spend is critical. Integrating our invoicing process with the company’s finance team. That continues to be a challenge in addition to staying with budget. Making sure everybody on your team in on top of the budget and they have the right visibility and information to what the spend is. Our finance team has their own accounting systems and we use legal tracker for our invoicing. We used technology to integrate that.

I think the other challenge everybody in legal operations seems to have is having to tell people how important it is to be process oriented. Everyone thinks the answer is ‘let’s get one technology’ and that will resolve all of the problems we have, but technology is only as good as the people that use it and the processes that we have.

How has CLOC helped you be successful in your legal Operations role?

I love the amount of material that is out there within CLOC, but more than that is the access to your peers is amazing. I think the Member Forum is great, you put a question, you get responses. I’ve been able to reach out to people across the world. I am based out of Mumbai, India, but I speak to peers in the U.S., Australia, U.K., and Singapore. I am able to learn from their experiences and share my experiences with them. It has been immensely helpful for me personally and professionally.

What is one thing you would say to inspire your fellow CLOC Members to become more involved in the development of the legal operations profession?

I think really proactive contributions of content is something that all of us need to do. I try to do it as much as possible but think I can do it a little bit more. If we can share our experiences as we are dealing with these problems on a real time basis, I think that is critical. We should think about how we are developing the future of this field. How are we engaging with graduates or lawyers and explaining to them what this all entails and really get all the right people on, early on. When I graduated, there was no concept of legal operation, it didn’t exist. It is still a fairly new role in the legal industry, but fairly critical and important role. It is very important for us to think about the future and how to develop more and more people into this role so that there is no vacuum at any point in time.