Neha Gupta

Senior Associate, Corporate & Commercial | Contracts, transactions and the occasional Hindi-English monologue

I’m a corporate lawyer at Kesora Legal in Delhi, working on commercial contracts, investment transactions and the parts of due diligence nobody puts on a slide. I like a clean redline, a clear recommendation and meetings that end with an actual decision. Outside work, I rehearse with a Hindi-English theatre troupe, plot Old Delhi food walks and lose online blitz games because I insist on making one more clever move. My weeks are long; my explanations are usually shorter.

Advise founder-led businesses and growth-stage companies on investment transactions, shareholders’ agreements and commercial contracts at a mid-size Delhi firm. Coordinate due diligence, negotiate transaction documents and supervise two junior associates. Built a practical clause bank with notes on when a fallback is useful—and when it merely postpones an argument.

Drafted and reviewed vendor agreements, service contracts and transaction documents. Prepared due diligence reports and closing checklists, tracked outstanding deliverables and worked with clients’ finance and operations teams to resolve documentation gaps.

Corporate Law, Commercial Contracts, Legal Due Diligence, Transaction Management, Shareholders’ Agreements, Contract Negotiation, Legal Research, Legal Drafting, Client Advisory, Team Mentoring

Hindi, English

A junior asked me this week how to make a diligence finding sound more senior. My answer: make it more useful. What is missing? What could happen because it is missing? Can we fix it before closing, or does the client need to price the risk? Three plain sentences often do more work than a page of impressive vocabulary. This is also advice I periodically need to give myself.

Theatre rehearsal after a day of negotiations is a surprisingly effective diagnostic tool. Apparently I can spend ten minutes explaining a liability cap, but still rush the one pause that makes a scene land. Our director stopped me three times last night: let the other person finish. Fair criticism, on stage and off it. Working on listening without preparing my next line. Less glamorous than delivering a monologue. Considerably harder.

Small process improvement that earned its keep this month: one closing checklist, one owner per item, and a separate column for what is actually blocking completion. Not ‘pending’. Not ‘being looked into’. The specific document, approval or answer we still need. It sounds painfully obvious until six people are emailing six versions of the same spreadsheet. We spent less time asking for status and more time getting things signed.

A reminder from a long week of contract reviews: a fallback clause is not useful just because the other side accepts it. Someone still has to operate under it. Before calling a compromise workable, I try to ask the operations team what compliance would look like on an ordinary Tuesday. That conversation has saved us from some beautifully drafted, thoroughly impractical obligations. Plain questions deserve more space in the process.