Global Leadership, Global Expertise

By Will Grant

Inderpreet Sawhney came relatively late to law but is now a best-in-class global leader at Infosys

WHEN INDERPREET SAWHNEY JOINED INFOSYS AS general counsel in 2017, it caught the attention of CEO Vishal Sikka. “I am delighted to welcome Inderpreet Sawhney to Infosys. Inderpreet has a strong and diverse global experience over a career spanning twenty-four-plus years, and her expertise will be integral to the transformation journey we are on,” Sikka said in a statement.

Sawhney served as a partner at the Chugh Firm for fourteen years prior to going in-house as a general counsel at Wipro in 2011. Along her legal journey, Sawhney has been recognized repeatedly for her strategic vision and business partnership, including the 2006 Minority Bar Coalition Unity Award, the 2010 Outstanding Mentorship Award from the South Asian Bar Association of Northern California, the 2010 North American South Asian Bar Association (NASABA) Cornerstone Award, and the 2013 NASABA Corporate Counsel Achievement Award.

The journey from childhood to award-winning lawyer wasn’t an easy one. The self-described “Army brat” lived in substandard military housing growing up, and her family relocated every two years. “In India, everything changes from one state to another—the language, food, the way people dress,” Sawhney told the ACC Docket in a September 2019 article.

But after forgoing her economics studies in favor of law school, a decision she says was very late as far as most Indian students’ education paths go, she gained both internal and firm experience prior to relocating to the United States for the first big dot-com boom. “There was this buzz around, and I wanted to step in and take advantage of that,” Sawhney recalled to the ACC Docket

It was during this period that Sawhney learned one of the most important lessons of her career: to separate the message from the messenger. The lawyer feels it’s critical to try to remove the bias one might feel toward a colleague and instead, to do one’s best to resolve the issue at hand.

Since coming to Infosys—a consulting and digital services company headquartered in South Indian megacity and well-known IT hub Bangalore—the attorney has been tasked with overseeing litigation, M&A, compliance, IP, government relations, and employment functions on an international scale for a company with 200,000 employees worldwide. “The most exciting thing about working for Infosys is its global footprint,” Sawhney told the ACC Docket. “We are so spread out and have such a large footprint that we have to have a dynamic system in place to make sure we stay compliant with everything we need to be compliant with.”

That requires Sawhney to travel to Bangalore, where nearly half of Infosys’ legal team is located, several times a year. On the way, she’ll likely also stop in the UK, Germany, or any of the company’s other bases to have face-to-face meetings with other members of her global team. Traveling, however, is ill advised as of this writing in March 2020.

Infosys has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in full force. The Infosys Foundation, the philanthropic and corporate social responsibility arm of Infosys, donated more than $13 million to charities including the Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund (PM CARES Fund), established in late March 2020 to combat

Inderpreet Sawhney Global General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer Infosys