Pulin Kumar
Pulin Kumar is presently working as a Senior Legal Director of Adidas (India). He has an extensive exposure of handling high stake cases in various High Courts and the Supreme Court. He has had an illustrious tenure as an in-house counsel dealing with commercial matters and other matters. He has extensively worked on the issues related to the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLAT) and Extradition Treaties with various countries and interacted with the legal counsels located at across the globe.
Mr. Kumar during his tenure with various organisations, have also been involved in execution of the foreign contracts and high-stake international commercial arbitration. Mr. Kumar is actively involved withvarious regulatory groups of business houses. He looks after the legal and compliance functions of adidas India and Reebok India. The mandate includes contract, compliance, litigation management, alternate dispute resolution, advisery of the legal commercial issues and a compliant business development.
Mr. Kumar is a commerce graduate from Patna University and Law graduate from Campus Law Centre, University of Delhi in 1991, followed by Master of Laws from Symbiosis International in 2020 besides a PG Diploma in IR&PM from Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, New Delhi. His professional journey started as an in-house counsel from Indian and MNC conglomerates like Montari Industries, Triveni Engineering, Ambuja Cements, New Holland Tractors, Jubilant Organosys and Samsung India.
Mr. Kumar has been a part of many significant best practices and improvements in the internal governance related to the corporate sector and has immensely contributed to this area. He has been actively participating in legal conferences both as listener and speaker. Mr. Kumar also co-hosts a knowledge-sharing platform “Sadgamaya” an informal association, founded by a few like-minded General Counsels and lawyers. He is well connected to more than thousand in-house counsels and lawyers in India and abroad through this forum meant for exchange of legal related knowledge. Mr. Kumar has extensively worked in the space of FDI in India and policies regarding wholesale cash & carry and single brand retail trading licence.
During his tenure he has coordinated with many state holders and handled multiple investigations and enquiries by different authorities together with multiple litigations pending in the courts.
The most significant achievement has been in laying the foundation stone of an important menace in India like parallel imports, says Mr. Kumar. During his tenure as the Legal Head for Samsung India, he initiated a legal case fighting against the menace of Parallel Imports which today is pending in the Supreme Court.
Mr. Kumar has been conferred with an award of the “General Counsel of the year 2015-Retail” by Indian National Bar Association (INBA), rated amongst top 50 General Counsels by LEGALERA magazine in 2016, legal team led by him has been included in The Legal 500 Powerlist: India 2017. He has also been included in the GC Powerlist: India as one of the Most Influential Lawyers in Business in the year 2016 and 2018 by Legal 500.com.
“The need of the hour is to have a complete harmony between the industries and the various regulations. Legal teams of the industries and the Government should work in partnership to give a complete boost to the economic development of the nation. Further, this team together can work hand-in-hand and promote overall growth and give a major thrust to boost mutual economic health of the sector and the nation,” says Mr. Kumar.