India’s new data protection law has been months in the making. The Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 was tabled in parliament by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in December that year; since then it is being analysed by a Joint Parliamentary Committee in consultation with experts and stakeholders. Key aspects to the bill include sweeping mechanisms for protection of personal data, setting up a Data Protection Authority of India (DPA), a provision that the central government can exempt any government agency from the bill, and the “Right to Be Forgotten.” Since it was tabled, reaction has been mixed: There is the acknowledgement that India does need to fortify its data protection laws, coupled with the anxiety that the bill could be a serious threat to Indians' privacy. You can play a really cool card game to understand the bill better, and do also read this recent piece about the “arduous task” that lies ahead of the proposed DPA.

India’s second-largest firm, Khaitan & Co, is set to open an office in Singapore next month. The office will be manned by Anuj Shah, a partner focusing on M&A and private client work, and director Jean Muller.

Bharath MS, formerly head of Anand and Anand’s South India practice, has set up an intellectual property-focused firm called KRIA Law.

It is not surprising that the brightest silver lining has been the increase of digitilization. It opens up many possibilities from doing fintechs to data centers. The impact is that it requires lawyers to be more sophisticated and to have the ability to synthesize things, to see things as interlinked and in holistic ways.

Following the collapse of commodities giants Agritrade International Pte Ltd (“Agritrade”) and Hin Leong Trading (“Hin Leong”), the fragility of the commodities market became painfully clear, with financiers, banks and traders alike scrambling to secure cargo amounting to millions in trade financing.

Counsel to Mitbana Pte Ltd, a joint venture company of Mitsubishi Corporation (MC) and Surbana Jurong (SJ), in the biggest and first-of-its-kind integrated smart and sustainable Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs) in BSD City, where the Project transform hundreds of hectares of greenfield land into TODs, including railways and public transport nodes, which expand BSD’s population of 200,000 residents.

U.S. law firm Debevoise & Plimpton has closed its five-year-old office in Tokyo.

Priya Rao, a former partner at India’s K&S Partners, has set up a boutique firm called Priya Rao & Associates in Delhi. The two-partner firm will focus on intellectual property, information technology and litigation.

What started as a simmering feud with Twitter over the farmer protests is now threatening to boil over, and technology companies might need to rethink what they’re doing in the kitchen. India turned up the heat last week after announcing the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code, a legally enforceable set of rules that, among other things, tightens regulatory scrutiny of social media platforms that have five million users in the country. Critics have been quick to denounce it as anti-democratic and unconstitutional; and say they could pose a threat to freedom of expression. Reuters points out that it is part of a broader trend of tech scrutiny globally, while the rules could be emulated by other countries such as the US, the UK and Australia, according to the Economic Times.