In Conversation with Kanan Chawda
Partner at White and Brief - Advocates & Solicitors
1. With over a decade of experience in commercial disputes, arbitration, and contracts, what have been the key milestones that shaped your journey as a dispute resolution lawyer?
Kanan Chawda:
Looking back, the milestones that mattered were rarely the ones that looked significant at the time.
The first was being put on my feet early. My initial years were spent in court doing work that is easy to dismiss as routine: filings, mentioning matters, taking orders, and sitting through the board watching how judges receive arguments and how they lose patience with them. That period taught me procedure, which I have since come to regard as substantive law by another name, and it taught me the temperament of a forum, which no amount of reading can supply.
The second was the first arbitration I conducted independently, from pleadings through evidence and cross-examination to the award, and then in the proceedings that followed it. Running a matter end to end teaches you something a brief in a part-heard matter cannot: that an arbitration is won or lost in the record, and that the record is built long before the first hearing. It changed the way I prepare every matter, contentious or otherwise.
The third was managing the pan-India consumer dispute portfolio of over 800 matters for IndiGo. That mandate forced me to stop thinking case by case and start thinking institutionally, about categories of claim rather than individual files, about systems and consistency of position, and about reporting to a client in the language of exposure and trend lines rather than hearing dates.
The fourth was a decision rather than an event: to build a contracts practice alongside the disputes practice instead of treating the two as separate careers. Most litigators come to the view that they would have drafted the document differently. Very few get to act on it. Doing both has made me a better lawyer at each.
The most recent milestone has been taking on the role of Partner in Dispute Resolution, ADR and Contracts. That transition has been less about volume of work and more about the nature of what one is accountable for. It is one thing to be responsible for effort and quite another to be responsible for judgment, for the development of the people in your team, and for the outcome a client has to live with.
2. Your practice uniquely combines Dispute Resolution and Contracts. How does your courtroom and arbitration experience influence the way you draft and negotiate contracts, and what makes a contract truly "dispute-ready"?
Kanan Chawda:
Litigation is the most rigorous form of contract review that exists. Every dispute I have argued has been, in effect, a stress test of somebody’s drafting, and the clauses that fail are almost never the ones the parties negotiated hardest. They are the ones nobody thought about because they seemed procedural.
The practical consequence is that I read a draft backwards. Before I turn to the commercial terms, I ask how the document will read to a tribunal three or four years from now, when the transaction has soured, the people who negotiated it have moved on, the counterparty is being advised on how to escape its consequences, and all that survives is the paper and whatever contemporaneous record the parties happened to create. If a clause cannot survive that reading, it does not matter how elegantly it is drafted.
A contract is dispute-ready, in my view, when it does the following. It defines default and breach in objective terms rather than leaving them to characterisation, and it prescribes a cure mechanism with identifiable timelines. It ties every material obligation to a date or a verifiable trigger, so that the question of who defaulted first does not itself become the dispute. It builds in evidence-generating mechanics, that is to say notices, acknowledgments, milestone sign-offs, and certifications, because a well-drafted obligation that leaves no trail of performance is of limited use in a proceeding. It contains a dispute resolution clause that has actually been thought about rather than copied, one that is clear on the seat and the venue, the number of arbitrators and the mechanism for their appointment, the language, the governing law, and whether the reference is institutional or ad-hoc. A very substantial volume of pre-arbitral litigation in this country is generated by clauses that are internally inconsistent or silent on precisely these points, and every such petition is a delay the parties paid for at the drafting stage without realising it.
Equally, it attends to matters that read as housekeeping and decide cases. Service and notice provisions with correct addresses, including e-mail addresses, and a clear position on when service is deemed complete. Adequacy of stamping and proper execution, including the authority of the signatory. Clauses on survival, severability, and limitation that are drafted with an eye on what remains enforceable after termination. Also, an honest assessment of whether the contract can realistically be performed on the timelines it prescribes, because a contract that is impossible to comply with is a contract that will be breached.
A dispute-ready contract is not an aggressive contract, and it is certainly not a longer one. It is a contract that makes the consequences of a breach so predictable that neither side sees an argument worth funding. The best outcome for a contract I have drafted is that it never comes before a tribunal at all.
Kanan Chawda:
The choice of mechanism is a commercial decision that is too often taken as a drafting reflex, usually at the end of a long negotiation when everybody is tired and the dispute resolution clause is the last item on the list. In my experience the analysis turns on a handful of honest questions.
First, what does the party actually want if things go wrong? Recovery of money, specific performance, an orderly exit, the preservation of a commercial relationship, or a determination that will govern conduct going forward. These call for different mechanisms, and the answer for a one-time supply contract is not the answer for a joint venture or a long-term distribution arrangement in which the parties will still need each other after the dispute is over.
Second, is the mechanism proportionate to the likely dispute? Arbitration is not inexpensive. For a contract with modest value and a high volume of small claims, an arbitration clause can cost more to invoke than the claim is worth, and parties then simply do not enforce their rights. Conversely, for a complex, technical, or confidential dispute, the ability to appoint a tribunal with the relevant domain expertise and to keep the proceedings private is worth a great deal.
Third, what is the position on interim protection and enforcement? If the real risk is dissipation of assets or continuing harm, the availability and speed of interim relief matters more than the elegance of the final process. Where the counterparty or its assets are outside India, the enforceability of the eventual award or decree in the relevant jurisdiction should drive the choice, and it should be considered at the drafting stage rather than discovered at the enforcement stage.
Fourth, and this is frequently overlooked, can the dispute even be arbitrated, and can the statutory forum be contracted out of? Certain remedies are conferred by statute and survive an arbitration clause. Consumer remedies, remedies before the real estate regulator, and proceedings under the insolvency framework are the obvious illustrations. Drafting a wide arbitration clause does not eliminate the possibility of parallel statutory proceedings, and a strategy that assumes otherwise tends to be corrected expensively.
Fifth, institutional or ad-hoc. Institutional arbitration brings administrative machinery, a default appointment mechanism when the parties will not cooperate, published fee scales, and timelines that a reluctant party finds harder to derail. I recommend it as the default for cross-border, multi-party, and multi-contract structures. Ad-hoc arbitration can work perfectly well for a domestic bilateral dispute where both sides are represented by experienced counsel and are genuinely interested in a determination, but it depends heavily on the goodwill of the parties, which is in short supply precisely when it is needed.
Sixth, mediation and conciliation deserve more serious consideration than they usually receive. Businesses continue to treat them as a formality to be completed before the real proceeding begins. That is a missed opportunity. Where the relationship has commercial value, where the dispute is about the quantum rather than the entitlement, or where both sides are exposed to reputational or regulatory consequences, a mediated settlement is often the outcome the parties would have reached after three years of arbitration and considerable cost. With the statutory framework for mediation now in place and pre-institution mediation a requirement for commercial suits that do not involve urgent interim relief, the incentive is to treat that stage as a genuine opportunity to settle rather than a box to be ticked.
My general advice to clients is to decide the mechanism by reference to the disputes the contract is realistically likely to produce, not the disputes one fears in the abstract, and to have the clause drafted by somebody who has had to litigate one.
4. You have managed a pan-India consumer dispute portfolio of over 800 matters for IndiGo. What are the key challenges of managing high-volume, multi-city litigation, and what strategies help ensure effective dispute management?
Kanan Chawda:
High-volume litigation is a different discipline from complex litigation, and the mistake is to manage it with the same tools. The difficulty is not that any individual matter is hard. It is that the portfolio, taken as a whole, generates risks that no single file reveals.
The first challenge is geography and procedural divergence. A pan-India portfolio means multiple forums, each with its own procedure, listing practice, and local conventions, and it means depending on local counsel whose work you cannot personally supervise on the day. The second is the risk of a matter going undefended. In a portfolio of several hundred files, orders passed for non-appearance or for delay in filing are the single largest avoidable source of adverse outcomes, and they arise from administrative failure rather than from any weakness in the defence. The third is consistency. Where the same category of complaint recurs across the country, an admission or a concession made in one forum has a way of appearing in another, and a portfolio defended without a settled position is a portfolio that will eventually contradict itself. The fourth is proportionality: the cost of defending a small-value claim across several hearings routinely exceeds the claim, which means that the defence strategy has to be commercially rational and not merely legally correct. The fifth is the retrieval of evidence at scale, since these matters are usually decided on records held in the client’s systems and the value of that material depends entirely on how quickly it can be located and how reliably it can be proved.
The approaches that have worked for me are as follows.
Organise the portfolio by cause of action rather than by city. Once matters are grouped by the underlying complaint, patterns emerge, standard defences can be developed and approved once, and the pleadings become a matter of adaptation rather than fresh drafting. This is also what makes settlement policy possible.
Maintain a single source of truth. One tracker, updated as a matter of discipline, recording forum, stage, next date, claim value, exposure, the position taken, and the next action with an owner against it. Reporting that is scattered across e-mail threads is not reporting.
Build a local counsel network and brief it uniformly. A standard brief format, a standard reporting template after every hearing, and clarity on what must be escalated and what may be decided locally. Local counsel are far more effective when they are told what the client’s position is across the country, not merely what to say in the matter in front of them.
Create a settlement and escalation matrix with pre-agreed authority. Small-value matters that fall within defined parameters should be capable of resolution without a fresh internal approval each time. This is the single largest saving available in a portfolio of this kind, in cost and in management attention.
Close the feedback loop with the client’s operations team. This is the part of the mandate that creates the most value and is the least often asked for. If the same category of complaint generates a hundred matters a year, the answer is not a better defence. It is a change in the process, the disclosure, or the customer communication that is generating the complaints. Litigation data, presented properly, is operational intelligence, and a portfolio that shrinks is a better outcome for the client than a portfolio that is won.
5. Having appeared before the Supreme Court, High Courts, NCLT, Arbitral Tribunals, and other forums, how has your experience across diverse forums shaped your approach to advocacy and complex legal strategy?
Kanan Chawda:
Appearing across forums teaches you, above all, that advocacy is situational. The same set of facts has to be presented very differently depending on who is hearing it and what that forum is empowered to do, and the lawyer who has one register is at a disadvantage everywhere except in the one place it works.
The constitutional courts operate under acute pressure of time and are, in the main, interested in the point rather than the narrative. Before the Supreme Court and the High Courts, the discipline that matters is selection: identifying the one or two propositions on which the matter genuinely turns, being able to state them in the first minute, and having the confidence to abandon the rest. Prolixity is not merely inefficient before those courts; it is affirmatively harmful, because it dilutes the point that might have succeeded.
The National Company Law Tribunal is a jurisdiction of thresholds, documents, and timelines. Arguments framed in the language of equity tend not to travel well there. What matters is whether the statutory ingredients are established on the record, whether the objection is one the Tribunal is empowered to entertain at that stage, and whether the commercial logic of the relief sought is apparent. The framing has to be precise and, in a sense, unsentimental.
Arbitral tribunals give you what the courts cannot: time, and a tribunal that will read the papers in full. That is a privilege and a trap. It means the pleadings, the documents, and the evidence carry the case, and it means that weaknesses cannot be glossed over in oral argument because the tribunal will find them. Cross-examination is where arbitration is often decided, and preparing for it requires a command of the documents that is qualitatively different from what a hearing on affidavits demands.
Consumer forums and other statutory forums require plain language and a human account of the transaction, and they are quick to identify a technically correct submission that is unfair on the facts. Appearing there over many matters has probably improved my advocacy more than any other single experience, because it removes the option of hiding behind vocabulary.
What all of this has settled into is a habit of preparation that begins with two questions rather than one. Not only what my client is entitled to, but what this forum can actually grant, and in what language that relief must be framed for it to be granted. A great deal of what is described as strategy in complex matters is really this: choosing the right forum, seeking relief that the forum is comfortable granting, and building the record before it is needed. The rest is candour. Every forum, without exception, responds better to counsel who concedes the point that cannot be defended, because credibility is the only asset one carries from one matter to the next.
Kanan Chawda:
A few themes cut across all these sectors, and then each has its own.
In real estate and under the real estate regulatory regime, the pressure point has shifted from sale of units to redevelopment. Redevelopment brings a structurally more difficult set of disputes than a primary sale: societies and their members with divergent interests, developers with financing constraints, the execution and enforcement of permanent alternate accommodation arrangements, disputes over consent thresholds and the validity of society resolutions, and delays in which the affected parties are not investors but families living in transit. Layered over that is a jurisdictional question that businesses continue to underestimate, namely the overlap between the regulator, the consumer forums, the civil courts, and arbitration, and the fact that a well-drafted arbitration clause does not displace an allottee’s statutory remedies. Developer insolvency and the treatment of allottees within it remains the other significant exposure. On the transactional side, title and stamp duty risk in long chains of ownership continues to be the defect that surfaces at the worst possible moment, which is when finance is being drawn or a unit is being sold on.
In finance, enforcement has become a question of sequencing rather than of choosing a single remedy. Lenders now have several routes available, each with its own timeline, cost profile, and risk of the borrower obtaining protection elsewhere, and the discipline lies in deciding the order in which they are used and in perfecting security properly at the outset so that the chosen route is available at all. Enforcement against personal guarantors and the interaction between guarantee actions and the resolution of the principal borrower is an area in which the law has been moving, and I would advise anyone lending on personal guarantees to have those documents reviewed against the current position rather than the position when the template was drafted. The regulatory overlay on newer lending structures, including co-lending and digitally originated credit, is the other area where documentation and regulatory expectation are frequently out of alignment.
In media and entertainment, the pressing issues are about rights and about machines. Rights chains are fragmented, licences are drafted for distribution models that have since changed, and the definitions that matter, being territory, term, media, window, and the treatment of derivative and remake rights, are often too loose to answer the question that eventually arises. Personality and publicity rights, the unauthorised use of a person’s voice, likeness, or manner, and synthetic content that imitates a performer are now live commercial disputes rather than academic questions. Generative technology raises three distinct problems that should be addressed separately in contracts and not bundled into a single artificial intelligence clause: what material was used to train the tool, who owns and who may exploit the output, and who bears the risk if the output infringes. Influencer and endorsement arrangements attract both advertising standards and consumer law exposure, and the contractual allocation of that risk is usually thinner than it should be.
Across all three sectors, three developments will affect everybody. The data protection framework, as it comes into force in stages, will require businesses to look again at their vendor contracts, their consent architecture, and their breach protocols, and this is not a matter that can be handled with a single clause. Second, the growing use of automated tools in contracting and in operations creates evidentiary and accountability questions that few contracts presently address. Third, cross-border enforcement risk is now a mainstream concern rather than a specialist one, given how many mid-sized Indian businesses now have counterparties, holding structures, or investors outside India.
If I had to reduce it to one recommendation: businesses should audit their standard-form contracts against the disputes they have actually had in the last three years. That exercise is inexpensive, it takes very little management time, and it consistently identifies more exposure than a general legal audit does.
7. For young lawyers aspiring to build careers in commercial litigation, arbitration, and contracts, what skills, mindset, and practical experiences are essential to becoming a successful dispute resolution lawyer and trusted legal advisor?
Kanan Chawda:
I would offer four things.
On skills, learn to read and to write, in that order. Reading means reading the whole file, the whole statute, and the whole judgment, not the paragraph that has been extracted for you. A great many arguments are lost because the passage relied on says something different when read with what precedes it. Writing means writing so that a busy reader understands the point on the first reading. Drafting is not the transcription of thought; it is the discipline that reveals whether the thought was clear to begin with. Alongside that, take procedure and limitation seriously. Young lawyers tend to treat them as technicalities to be handled by somebody else, and they decide more matters than doctrine does. Learn to be comfortable with numbers, contracts, and the commercial substance of what the client does, because a lawyer who cannot follow the transaction cannot protect it.
On mindset, be the person who does the unglamorous parts properly. The paper book that is properly indexed, the chronology that is accurate, the tracker that is current, the compilation that is where it should be when it is called for. This is how trust is built, and trust is what leads to being sent into court alone. Develop the habit of saying that you do not know but will find out, because the alternative habit, which is improvising, will eventually cost a client something. Expect adverse orders and learn not to take them personally; the objective is to understand why the forum was not persuaded, and to be candid with the client about it. Above all, be patient. This is a long practice, and the compounding is slow at the start and then considerable.
On practical experience, seek out four things in your early years. Draft a pleading from a blank page, however unsatisfactory the first attempt, and then read the version that was eventually filed to see what was changed and ask why. See one arbitration through its full cycle, from the notice invoking arbitration to the award, because that arc is what teaches you how a record is built. Watch a cross-examination conducted by somebody good at it, and prepare for one yourself. Sit in court on days when you have no matter, in the courts of judges who are not hearing your case, because court craft is learnt by observation and not by instruction. If you can add a due diligence exercise and a live negotiation to that list, you will understand risk in a way that purely contentious training does not teach.
Finally, on becoming a trusted adviser rather than only a competent lawyer, the distinction is that clients come to a trusted adviser before the problem rather than after it. That position is earned in three ways: by answering the question that was actually asked, in plain language, and by the time it was needed; by giving the client the commercial consequence and not merely the legal position, including a recommendation, because a client who receives three options and no view has not been advised; and by being willing to say that a course of action is a bad idea. The lawyer who is only agreeable is of limited use. The one who is reliable, clear, and willing to disagree gets the call early, and getting the call early is what allows you to do your best work.
