Thirteen ways into
Indian legal work.

Indian civil litigation runs on a clock you cannot negotiate with: s.3 of the Limitation Act, 1963 requires a court to dismiss a time-barred suit even where limitation was never pleaded as a defence, and s.5 condonation reaches appeals and applications but never suits. Most commercial litigation is contract litigation — damages under s.73 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872, the s.74 ceiling on stipulated penalties, and specific performance under the Specific Relief Act, 1963. This hub gathers the periods, the provisions and the LexVio capabilities that read a judgment or a contract before the clock runs out.

Running an Indian company is a filing calendar attached to a governance code. The Companies Act, 2013 fixes the AGM under s.96(1), the annual return under s.92, financial statements under s.129 and s.137(1), director duties under s.166, interest disclosure under s.184 and related-party approvals under s.188 — and s.248 lets the Registrar strike the company off when it goes quiet. This hub links the governing sections to the nine ROC filings you actually have to diarise.

Every Indian contract stands or falls on the same handful of sections: s.10 for formation, s.23 for lawful object, s.27 which voids restraint of trade, s.28 which voids clauses that shorten your time to sue, s.55 on time being of the essence, and ss.73-74 on what a breach is actually worth. LexVio scores each clause against a benchmarked corpus of 22 market-standard clauses across SaaS, NDA, MSA, employment and vendor agreements, then hands back tracked-change Word output.

Indian employment work now straddles two regimes: the labour codes (Social Security 2020, Wages 2019, OSH 2020) with the old scheme provisions saved during transition, and the Indian Contract Act, 1872 whose s.27 voids the post-termination non-compete that half of all Indian offer letters still contain. The recurring obligations are relentless — EPF and ESI monthly, ESI half-yearly returns, the POSH annual report, statutory bonus, and salary TDS under s.192.

IP work in an Indian commercial practice is mostly contractual: who owns what the contractor built, what survives termination, and whether the licence grant is broad enough for the product you shipped. LexVio's benchmarked corpus carries market-standard IP-ownership clauses for both SaaS and employment agreements, the NDA generator ships an IP-heavy template, and the seeded statute library covers the Trade Marks Act, 1999 for the registration and infringement tests.

Indian statutory compliance is 49 live recurring obligations across nine regulators — GST, income-tax, MCA/ROC, LLP, EPF/ESI, labour, RBI, FEMA and SEBI — each with its own citation, applicability test and penalty ladder. The dates are statutory and do not shift for Sundays; regulators extend only by ad-hoc notification. This hub maps the governing provisions to the calendar, the ROC forms and the DPDP readiness assessment.

Indian tax practice is mid-transition: the Income-tax Act, 1961 governs income up to 31 March 2026 and the Income-tax Act, 2025 takes over from 1 April 2026, collapsing 819 sections into 536 and folding most TDS obligations into table serials inside s.393. GST runs in parallel under the CGST Act, 2017. This hub carries the section mapper, the TDS finder, the slab tables, the CII series and the interest calculator, each citing its own source.

Arbitration, insolvency, consumer and cheque-bounce proceedings each run on a deadline the Limitation Act does not govern, and two of them are hard ceilings no court can lift: s.34(3) of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 allows three months plus at most thirty days 'but not thereafter', and s.61(2) of the IBC caps a NCLAT appeal at thirty days plus fifteen. The clause that sends you there is drafted long before the dispute, which is where LexVio reads it.

Indian property work is decided by three things a contract review must catch: whether the instrument is adequately stamped under the state's own schedule, whether the claim is inside its limitation article — thirty years to redeem a mortgage, twelve for possession on title, three for specific performance — and what the tax position is on transfer, where indexation was withdrawn for most transfers on or after 23 July 2024.

Lending and financial-services work in India sits across four regulators at once: the RBI for NBFC registration and net owned fund under s.45IA of the RBI Act, 1934 and for ECB reporting; SEBI for market conduct under ss.12A, 15G and 15HA of the SEBI Act, 1992; the NCLT for recovery under ss.7 and 9 of the IBC; and FEMA for FLA and overseas-investment reporting. The recovery clocks are Limitation Act articles 19, 21, 62 and 63.

Diligence on an Indian target is a document problem before it is a legal one: a data room of several thousand files, a reps-and-warranties package to test, indemnity caps and CPs to extract, and a Companies Act, 2013 overlay of related-party approvals under s.188, director interest disclosures under s.184 and financial statements under s.129. LexVio runs a deal-format diligence pass over the room and returns an India red-flag report.

The DPDP Act, 2023 is in force in name and phased in substance: the Data Protection Board provisions commenced on 13 November 2025, Consent Manager registration under s.6(9) opens on 13 November 2026, and the entire operative regime — notice, consent, security safeguards, breach intimation, children's data, Data Principal rights, cross-border and the penalty Schedule — commences on 13 May 2027. Everything you build between now and then is measured against that date.

Not every legal question arrives with a practice area attached. This hub is the entry point for the ordinary ones — is this agreement enforceable, how long do I have to sue, what does this clause actually do, which filing did I just miss — and points at the free scanner, the template library, the calculators and the residuary provisions of Indian law that catch what the specific ones do not.