Pankaj is the Founder and Director of KPO Consultants, a company providing business solutions exclusively to the LPO industry. His expertise encompasses various aspects of the legal outsourcing business—including strategy development, operations management, creating sales and marketing strategies, to name a few—and he has been responsible for facilitating strategic alliances between LPO vendors and law firms in the US, UK, and other buyer markets. His intricate knowledge of the LPO industry is such that the Government of Mauritius has invited him to address its industry leaders on diverse issues such as Building up the LPO Industry in Mauritius; Doing KPO Business in Africa; etc. Besides addressing numerous key conferences on the LPO industry, Pankaj regularly participates in national and international conferences organized by esteemed organizations like US Embassy, IACC, ASSOCHAM, PHDCCI, Lexis-Nexis, Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, Institute of Company Secretaries of India,etc. He has authored numerous white papers on legal outsourcing and off shoring, and is currently assisting few of India’s top research organizations on ‘Future of Legal Offshoring – Global Perspective’. By organizing the Global LPO Conference 2010 in India, it is his endeavor to bring buyers and vendors of the LPO industry on a common platform to address their key concerns and enable them to engage in meaningful dialogues to further their business interests.
Pankaj holds an MBA degree with concentrations in Marketing and Finance from IMI, Belgium. He is also an Associate Company Secretary (2001) from Institute of Company Secretaries of India.
As a Consultant, Apurv is responsible for assisting a number of legal outsourcing companies develop their operational capabilities. Prior to partnering with KPO Consultants, he carries more than 15 years of experience of working as a practicing Lawyer and also heading operations in top LPOs in India. He also offered his services in senior managerial capacity to two top legal outsourcing companies Integreon and Trivent Legal. During his last term with Trivent Legal, he served as Assistant Vice President of Legal Services building operational efficiencies for the company. He was responsible for all client interactions, operations and delivery, training and overall management of the Indian office.
Karuna is a lawyer who graduated from ILS Law College, Pune with a first division in 2005 and has a cumulative 4 years of work experience. She began her career with a campus placement as a Management Trainee in the Legal Claims Division with Cholamandalam MS General Insurance Company Ltd. Thereafter she worked as the end-to-end Manager of the Legal team at the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) that produced research reports for in house counsels at the world’s leading Fortune 500 companies. Joining at the entry level as a Research Associate at CEB, she was promoted to Manager within 14-18 months of her tenure.
At the very onset of her career, as an in house counsel with Cholamandalam, she managed the legal portfolio of over 800 insurance-related cases that required coordinating and administering work across different regions of Northern India amongst approximately 50 empanelled advocates. Not only did this mean handling lawyers from remote interiors of the country but also required her to budget and control legal department spend and negotiate third party awards in Court which could negatively impact the Company’s bottom-line.
As a Manager at the Corporate Executive Board, she independently set up and managed a team in India. She assessed client needs on various in-house legal issues and designed research projects to deliver solutions and insights for the same. To this end, she managed the complete life cycle of short and long-term research reports, guiding the team on initial research inquiry, pressure-testing depth of insights, editing documentation for business writing style and structuring for visual appeal. The research methodology focused on the case study approach, providing insights into proven practices from legal leaders and highlighting actual results, key economic rationales, and business imperatives. A key aspect of her role included interviewing and interacting with senior legal executives such General Counsels and Chief Legal Officers of some of the world’s biggest companies on strategies for understanding key legal issues and managing enterprise-wide risk compliance.
Currently, she is working as a Consultant with KPO Consultants, helping clients in the LPO space to analyze problems and develop solutions that meet the objectives of the client company.
Shekhar is based in the United States and offers consulting and operations capabilities to provide a complete and seamless process from-concept to deployment. He has got diverse background (British-born, Naturalized American of Indian origin) with experiences that range from executive position in a Fortune 5 company (Ford) to Board Member, CEO, COO and CFO roles in several start-ups. He is an expert on offshored services including legal, construction and medical services. He has worked on 4 continents (North America, Europe, Asia and Australia), and lived in 4 countries (USA, UK, Japan and India). He is also Board Member of several companies, including a public company. By education, Shekhar is an MBA, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, Marketing and Finance.
Rajiv Ranjan has more than a decade of experience in serving as Intellectual Property Strategic Asset Management expert at leading companies like Motorola, Inventurus and KED & Associates (a spin-off of Fleshner & Kim). He has been part of the knowledge & legal process outsourcing industry for more than 5 years and has experience of successfully shaping new start-up ventures. Rajiv has immense applied know-how in searching, drafting and analyzing patents. In particular, he specializes in design and implementation of strategies and mechanics for a variety of searches, such as novelty, infringement, Freedom-to-Operate (FTO)/Freedom-to-Practice (FTP), patentability, invalidation / validation, drafting patent applications, and drafting responses to office actions.
He has drafted more than 100 patent applications of which most of them have been published on USPTO online database. Rajiv has undergone 12 months rigorous training in US Patent Law for US Patent Agents conducted by US Patent Attorneys from Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at Motorola India. Rajiv has conducted corporate training programs at various technology firms, such as search mechanics at Lucas Technologies. Rajiv is Xilinx certified in Advanced Field Programmable Gate Arrays Design and Implementation and Brainbench certified in Active Server Pages. Rajiv was also associated with Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Lab Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre (INSDOC), now NISCAIR, as project engineer and held various positions, such as Senior Guest Counselor with IGNOU, Associateship in Information Science of CSIR and SAARC DOCUMENTATION CENTRE (SDC) at Delhi Congress. Rajiv’s area of expertise is drafting patents in Semicon, ASIC, Telecom and Meditronics domains.
Sanjay has more than 20 years of experience managing diverse number of corporate functions in outsourcing industry. He has been responsible for building several business units from scratch. Under his leadership and vision, one of the top BPOs grew from 120 in 2003 to 1000 in 2005. He also introduced concepts like ECGC to mitigate risk and helped company avoid losses of about US $ 150,000 in two years. Sanjay also managed successful completion of merger & acquisition deals with UK and Australian clients. Sanjay was also instrumental in streamlining operations and building systems supporting end-to-end process delivering services to clients. He also mastered the art of successful negotiation and clinching deals from buyers overseas.
Sanjay is a graduate in Computer Sciences from Delhi University and holds an MBA degree.