A founder sits in a meeting with their remote development team across three time zones. Code is being written. Data is moving. Everything feels productive. But nobody in the room has asked the question that matters: Where is the intellectual property actually owned? Who is responsible if that data crosses a border without permission? What happens to the liability when someone you’ve never met, hired by someone you have, outsources the work to a third party?
The founder doesn’t know these answers yet. They will, eventually. Usually when something breaks.
Meet Shashwat Jindal
Shashwat Jindal, a lawyer who has spent the last five years watching exactly this pattern repeat. He’s licensed to practice in both India and Ontario. He holds certifications in privacy (CIPP/C, CIPM) and information security (ISO 27001 Lead Auditor). On paper, these are credentials. In practice, they’re evidence of someone who refused to stay in the abstract world of legal documents and instead moved into the operational world where law actually has to function.
He runs Jindal Global Counsel in Ontario and Jindal Solicitors & Associates in India. He advises startups, SaaS companies, and technology firms on how to build legal structures that actually work across borders. And he’s become known for something unusual in his field: contracts that people can understand, compliance that operates invisibly in the background, and legal advice that doesn’t require hiring a translator.
The Inheritance
Shashwat didn’t choose law. He inherited it.
Growing up, his father was everywhere—in courtrooms during the day, in community service initiatives at night. Law wasn’t a career in his household. It was a calling. The distinction mattered. A career is something you do for yourself. A calling is something you do because you saw someone else do it first, and something in you recognized the pattern as true.
By the time Shashwat finished his BA.LLB from O.P. Jindal Global University in 2018, the path felt inevitable. But inevitable doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing.
The Unready Years
The first two years after graduation were brutal in a quiet way. He wasn’t going to court. He wasn’t joining an established firm. He was building something on his own, in a space he didn’t fully understand yet, serving clients who were betting real money on his judgment. Every decision felt like it rested entirely on him because it did.
He overanalyzed contracts. He reread documents twice. He second-guessed himself constantly. What kept him grounded was honesty. When he didn’t know something, he said so. When he needed more time, he asked. His clients respected that. Some of them even taught him things in return.
That early vulnerability became his real education. He learned that nobody arrives fully ready. The people who grow are simply the ones who begin before confidence shows up and keep working while it builds.
Building the Bridge
By 2021, he was ready to formalize what he’d been building. Jindal Solicitors & Associates opened officially, focusing on corporate law, intellectual property, data privacy, and the messy intersection where international business actually lives. But the real evolution came later, when he realized something crucial about the legal profession.
Most lawyers still treat their work like documentation specialists. Draft the policy. Check the box. Move on. Shashwat started asking a different question: What if the law actually had to work?
Crossing the Border
That question led him to Canada. In 2020, almost casually, he thought, “If my friend can build a practice in Ontario, so can I.” He cleared the National Committee of Accreditation exams. He passed the barrister and solicitor licensing exams. All while maintaining his full practice in India. All while continuing to serve clients across borders.
There were stretches where nothing felt like progress. Just repetition. Doubt. Long stretches of showing up without seeing results. But somewhere along the way, the goal stopped being about having a law firm in another country. It became about building something that could exist across borders, something that connected where he started with where he was going.
In April 2026, after months of preparation, Jindal Global Counsel Professional Corporation officially opened in Cambridge, Ontario. For the first time, he had the legal infrastructure to do what he’d always wanted: serve clients across two jurisdictions simultaneously, not as two separate practices but as one integrated platform.
Today, Shashwat’s work operates at a layer most lawyers never reach.
He spends his time doing something that sounds simple but requires a fundamentally different way of thinking. Instead of asking, “What does the law say?” he asks, “What does the system actually do?”
Most privacy work is policy work. You draft documents. You create compliance checklists. You check boxes. Regulators look at the documents, and if the documents look right, everyone assumes the system is working. But Shashwat has spent enough time inside actual businesses to know this is almost always a delusion.
“Privacy can’t just sit in policies anymore,” he explains. “Regulators and users both expect it to be built into how the product actually works.”
So he does something that sets him apart. Before he drafts anything, he maps the actual data flows. He sits down with technical teams. He understands how data is collected. How it moves across jurisdictions. Which vendors touch it. What happens to it in production. Only then does he write anything.
This approach reveals gaps that traditional legal work never sees. A client might think they have proper data handling procedures. But when Shashwat traces the actual data flows, he often finds that user information is moving across borders without the contractual structures to support it. Or that consent flows in the product don’t actually align with what the privacy policy claims. Or that a vendor agreement doesn’t account for subcontracting risks that could expose millions of data points.
The shift from policy to infrastructure means his contracts look different. They’re not just protective documents. They’re operational blueprints. When he drafts an agreement between a Canadian company and an Indian vendor, he’s not just allocating legal liability. He’s structuring what data can physically move where, how it gets encrypted, who can access it, what happens if a breach occurs, and how responsibility flows across two different legal systems.
With AI and SaaS companies, this becomes essential. He’s working on problems that didn’t exist five years ago. If a company is using customer data to train AI models, that raises questions that can’t be answered with a standard privacy policy. What data is used for training? What gets retained? How are outputs handled? How is liability allocated when an AI system makes a decision based on that data? These questions have to be embedded in the contracts themselves.
“The real work happens in translating policy into operational decisions,” he says. “We’re not just documenting risk. We’re structuring it.”
His work with cross-border hiring illustrates this perfectly. A founder in Canada hires a developer in India. The founder assumes this is an operational decision. Shashwat knows it’s actually a legal structure, and founders almost always get it wrong.
The first mistake is treating employment classification casually. Is this person an employee or a contractor? In Canada, the answer has specific tax implications and employment obligations. In India, it has different implications entirely. Most founders never clarify this explicitly, which creates exposure on both sides.
The second mistake is IP ownership. Founders assume anything created by a remote team automatically belongs to the company. Not true. Unless the IP is properly assigned in a contract that’s valid under both jurisdictions, ownership can be ambiguous. Shashwat has seen disputes where a developer claimed partial rights to code they wrote while working remotely, because the employment agreement wasn’t clear.
The third mistake, the one that keeps him up at night, is data access. When you have teams distributed across jurisdictions, especially in tech, access to production data needs to be structured carefully. “When teams are distributed across jurisdictions, access to production data or user data needs to be tightly structured,” he explains. “Otherwise you end up with cross-border transfer issues without even realizing it.”
What he’s describing is the invisible problem. The founder isn’t breaking any laws intentionally. They just never built the structure to prevent it.
This is where his approach becomes radically practical. Instead of lecturing about compliance, he builds systems. He works with clients to create role-based access controls. He designs how data can move and where it can’t. He structures contracts so that obligations are clear at every level. He builds documentation that actually reflects what the system does, not what people hope it does.
The Jindal Playbook: 5 Lessons
Law is a service profession, not a technical one. Understand what the client is actually trying to achieve commercially, then structure the legal side around that goal, not the other way around.
Contracts are drafted with your ears before your keyboard. Before writing anything, spend time understanding how the business actually operates—how they acquire customers, where risks sit, what could break. That understanding tells you what the contract needs to do.
Data doesn’t transfer responsibility along with it. If your data is processed by a vendor abroad, you remain accountable to your home regulator. Structure vendor agreements to reflect this reality through clear breach notification timelines, audit rights, and indemnity clauses.
Cross-border hiring is a legal structure, not an operational decision. Employment classification, IP ownership, and data access must be explicitly defined and aligned with law in both jurisdictions before work begins.
Privacy is infrastructure, not documentation. Regulators and users expect privacy to be built into how the product actually works. Map data flows, align consent mechanics, embed security obligations into product architecture, and structure contracts to reflect the system you’ve built.
A founder reads a contract Shashwat has drafted and experiences something unusual: clarity. Not simplification. Clarity. The distinction matters. A simplified contract often means important details have been removed. A clear contract means every detail serves a purpose and is written so someone without a legal degree can understand it.
This is harder to do than it sounds, especially in cross-border work. When you’re accounting for GDPR, PIPEDA, CCPA, and Indian privacy law simultaneously, the technical complexity is real. But Shashwat has a philosophy about this too.
“The balance is really about clarity of thinking first,” he says. “If the thinking is clear, the drafting tends to follow.”
This is why he’s become known not just among founders but among other lawyers. His recommendation letter from Frederikke Magnhild Cappelen, a global contracting expert, captures something revealing. She notes that while most lawyers see contracts as risk documents, Shashwat immediately grasped them as value drivers. He’s combining privacy expertise with contract architecture to create agreements that simultaneously protect data, ensure compliance, and unlock revenue streams. That’s not traditional legal thinking. That’s engineering applied to law.
He also hosts a podcast where he talks with founders and industry leaders about cross-border compliance, data governance, and emerging regulations. The conversations reveal his actual approach. He doesn’t give generic advice. He asks questions that force founders to confront the gap between what they think they’re doing and what their systems are actually doing.
The legal profession is still operating like it did twenty years ago. Law is documented. Clients read the documents and assume they’re protected. Regulators audit the documents and assume companies are compliant. Everyone pretends this actually works.
Shashwat has built his entire practice on the recognition that it doesn’t.
He’s taken the lessons his father taught him—that law is service, not technique, that accessibility matters, that you’re solving real problems for real people—and applied them to a world where businesses operate across borders, where data moves faster than regulation can follow, where the invisible infrastructure of compliance has become more important than the visible documents.
When something breaks, founders call him. They’ve usually already discovered the gap between what they thought was protecting them and what was actually protecting them. By then, the damage is done. But if they call him before building, before hiring, before moving data, he can help them structure it right from the start.
That’s the difference between law that sounds right and law that actually works.
Shashwat Jindal is the Founder of Jindal Global Counsel Professional Corporation, based in Cambridge, Ontario, and Founder of Jindal Solicitors & Associates in India. He advises technology companies, startups, and SaaS businesses on cross-border compliance, data privacy, and contract architecture that aligns legal obligation with operational reality. To connect with Shashwat or learn more, visit his profile at linkedin.com/in/shashwatjindal or email shashwat@jindalsolicitorsandassociates.com.
