Law

Hi Harsha,
In most cases, the legal head or General counsel of a company would be someone having few years of experience of practicing law (especially those working in a corporate law firm). However, there are legal heads who are not lawyers but are CAs or CSs.
In many companies, legal and compliance are one unit which sometimes allows exceptional candidates who are CS/CA to get promoted or appointed as a legal head. As most companies, would appoint external legal counsels or law firms to provide legal opinion, a CS/CA who has strong knowledge of corporate law and compliance can be a legal head provided he also understands and can take strategic decisions on litigation.
I doubt if any company would officially appoint someone as a legal advisor who have not done law, CS, or CA.
How to become a legal counsel for a company?
There are only a few sectors like Banks, Insurance companies and NBFCs (and in some cases big IT companies) appoints a fresh graduate as a legal officer. As most of these hiring are through campus placements, you might need to be in a good law school which has campus recruitment.
Most companies would expect a person with atleast 47 years of experience (mostly people with experience of working in a corporate law firm) as a senior Manager/ Manager. This might be the junior most position in the legal team in some cases. Many people who are fed up with the fast and highly demanding law firm jobs, prefer to move to in-house role. Many companies wants to hire people with domain knowledge of the sector they are in. For example, IT companies might want people who understands MSA/IT contracts, privacy laws or/and IP laws. The recent trends focuses on creating a full fledged legal team within the company with people having different domain knowledge, in order to reduce costs and dependency on external counsels. Currently there is a huge demand of M&A lawyers as in-house counsels. (Indian firms hire in-house M&A lawyers as dealmaking surges)
General Counsel or Legal Head positions are generally appointed from people having 10+ years of experience (either in a law firm or working in the in-house legal team).
I would bet on the following areas of expertise - M&A, General corporate, Taxation, TMT/IP to become an in-house counsel. Join a law firm and specialise in one of the above areas. Apply when you have the requisite experience.
All the best.