Corporate Employement Counsel

📋 Description

• • Serve as the single point of accountability for all corporate secretarial and employment-law matters across Freshworks Inc.’s APMEA footprint, ensuring the Board of Directors, Executive Leadership, and HR teams receive clear, timely, and commercially sound legal guidance.
• • Own the full corporate governance lifecycle: convene and manage Board, committee, and shareholder meetings; draft and circulate agendas, notices, and board packs; capture accurate minutes; and maintain statutory registers and minute books in accordance with the Companies Act 2013, SEBI LODR, and any other applicable regulations.
• • Drive zero-defect compliance with statutory filings to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), Registrar of Companies (ROC), stock exchanges, and sectoral regulators; build automated trackers and dashboards that flag upcoming deadlines and trigger early-warning alerts to eliminate last-minute firefighting.
• • Architect, review, and continuously improve global employment contracts, offer letters, ESOP grant letters, separation agreements, and contractor engagement templates to reflect evolving Indian labour codes, GDPR/CCPA data-privacy obligations, and local statutes across Singapore, Australia, UAE, and South Africa.
• • Act as the strategic employment counsel to CHRO and regional HRBPs on the full talent life-cycle—recruitment, background checks, immigration, performance management, disciplinary actions, redundancies, and exits—translating complex legal risks into practical, business-friendly solutions.
• • Chair and administer the Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) under the POSH Act; design anti-harassment and anti-retaliation training curricula; conduct impartial investigations; and prepare legally defensible closure reports that withstand regulatory or judicial scrutiny.
• • Monitor legislative and regulatory developments in labour, privacy, and corporate law across APMEA; publish succinct legal updates and host quarterly “ask-me-anything” sessions for HR and business leaders to embed a culture of proactive compliance.
• • Partner with Internal Audit, Risk, and InfoSec teams to design and test whistle-blower, data-breach, and anti-bribery controls; ensure incident-response playbooks align with global policies and local reporting obligations.
• • Lead or support employment-related litigation, arbitration, conciliation, and regulatory inquiries; select and manage external counsel, control legal spend, and present concise executive briefings that enable informed decision-making at the C-suite level.
• • Design scalable HR policy frameworks—code of conduct, remote-work, moonlighting, leave, benefits, and diversity programs—that harmonize global standards with nuanced local requirements, enabling consistent employee experience across 13+ countries.
• • Deliver engaging training to managers and employees on topics such as unconscious bias, POSH, GDPR/CCPA, and ethical use of AI in HR processes; measure effectiveness through pre/post assessments and iterate content based on feedback.
• • Champion a data-driven approach by leveraging HRIS, CLM, and entity-management platforms to generate real-time analytics on contract risk, compliance gaps, and litigation trends; present quarterly metrics to the Audit & Risk Committee.
• • Cultivate strong relationships with Finance, Tax, and M&A teams to ensure employment and corporate considerations are baked into due-diligence checklists, integration plans, and post-merger harmonization projects.
• • Foster an inclusive, high-performance legal culture by mentoring junior legal professionals and interns, promoting knowledge sharing, and embodying Freshworks’ core values of empathy, integrity, and customer-centricity.
• • Contribute to cross-functional ESG initiatives, ensuring labour practices, governance disclosures, and human-rights policies meet investor-grade standards and align with UN Global Compact principles.