Kapil Chaudhary and Sushmita Chaudhary have co-founded Verity Law Chambers, an independent law chamber in New Delhi that advises boards, general counsel and founders, including multinationals operating in or entering India, on AI governance, data protection, technology regulation and employment law. They will serve as joint managing partners.
“My background isn’t advisory-only,” Kapil Chaudhary told India Business Law Journal.
“I have sat inside the businesses being regulated – at IBM (India and Singapore), Autodesk, Twitter, Info Edge and Flutter International’s Junglee Games, where I had to make these calls under real-time pressure and real commercial constraint, including leading Twitter’s constitutional challenge to section 69A of the Information Technology Act before India’s Supreme Court,” he said.
Kapil Chaudhary brings more than 26 years of in-house legal leadership across India, Singapore and the wider South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation region. He has appeared before parliamentary standing committees on data protection and competition and is a fellow of the Singapore Institute of Arbitrators.
Sushmita Chaudhary has been at the bar since 2002. She has advised multinational and Indian employers across the full range of Indian employment and labour law and has appeared in commercial litigation matters. She has also advised on cross-border workforce and investigations work, and brings her global-network affiliations.
“Sushmita brings the same practitioner’s grounding to the employment and workplace side, where the actual tests of an organisation’s governance – a termination, a POSH (prevention of sexual harassment) investigation, a restructuring – play out,” said Kapil Chaudhary.
On their new venture, Kapil Chaudhary told India Business Law Journal: “Most law firms and chambers, in India and elsewhere, have built their technology practices as an extension of a broader corporate or TMT desk – capable, but structured around transactions rather than around the regulatory and operational reality that boards and general counsel are actually living through right now.
“India’s AI governance and data protection regimes, from India’s DPDP (Digital Personal Data Protection) framework to the EU AI Act, are moving from statute to implementation in real time and the businesses navigating it need advisers who understand not just the law but the systems the law is regulating, and who can place India’s obligations alongside those of the EU, the US and Asia-Pacific.”
Clarifying that Verity Law Chambers is “not a CSR (corporate social responsibility) add-on”. Chaudhary said. “The legal profession, in India and globally, is being reshaped by technology faster than most law schools or government institutions are able to adapt their own capacity for it, and our team thinks a chamber our size has a genuine role to play in closing that gap.”He added: “The team is committed to AI skilling and capacity building within government institutions, because a regulator that understands the technology it is regulating makes better law, and better law makes our job and our clients’ compliance burden considerably easier.”In the past month, with instances of rogue AI, regulators in India and abroad had announced measures to “slow the pace of AI development”. The risks of AI are real and immediate.
On the proposed challenges, Kapil Chaudhary told IBLJ, “The first point is regulatory velocity: the DPDP Act’s rules, sectoral AI guidance, and platform regulation in India, alongside the EU AI Act and other global regimes, are all moving from framework to enforcement within a short window, and most compliance programmes were designed for a much slower cycle.
“The second point is that AI governance has stopped being a technology-team problem and has become a whole-of-organisation one. Legal, finance, procurement, HR, product and the board now all make decisions with AI-governance consequences, often without realising it.
“The third point, and the one that gets the least attention, is on the employment side: the pace of organisational change. AI-driven restructuring, new ways of working, cross-border workforce models and India’s new labour codes are testing employment and POSH frameworks that were not designed with this pace of change in mind.
“Getting a termination, a restructuring or a workplace investigation wrong doesn’t just create legal exposure; it erodes exactly the kind of institutional trust we think Indian businesses need to earn as they scale, in India and beyond.”
