Trilegal Labour Head Ajay Raghavan to leave Firm, form Climate Change NGO and own Company

In the latest development, Trilegal's Bangalore-based Partner and Head of Employment Ajay Raghavan will leave the firm with effect from 01 April to set up its own Company and a non-profit organization dealing with Climate Change.

Raghavan who had worked with the firm for his entire legal career since graduating from ILS Pune in 2001, made a Partner in the firm in 2009.

Bangalore-based Trilegal Co-Founder Rahul Matthan commented that the employment practice at Trilegal would be “stable” following Raghavan’s departure.

“I‘ve been following the climate space for a while now,” said Raghavan, noting that while also preparing for the handover of the employment practice, he had spent the past years meeting people in Bangalore ranging from the government to entrepreneurs, ranging from waste to water to energy, to “understand what we’re doing at the city level around climate action and in general”.

He also mentioned that it is still early days and he wouldn’t start properly until retiring from Trilegal’s Partnership. Raghavan said he has already started to put together “a little bit of a framework”. And the more he worked on it he said, the more he realized “that perhaps, at a personal level, I could do a lot more”.

One initiative would be a non-profit around climate action in Bangalore, trying to work with environmental activists and lawyers to map out Bangalore’s next 10 years “as a city and build out a framework to be more climate-resilient”.

The second initiative would be a physical warehouse space in Bangalore, which would function as a “sustainability hub”, he said, and provide access to solutions around sustainability, including water and energy, and offer “curated classes for children” educating them about sustainability.

This would be a for-profit, but also with an obvious social enterprise element. Funding would be bootstrapped by Raghavan’s own savings from his years as a legal professional.