TheCEOVerse • Digital Edition
“Bridging Law and Tech: Driving Operational Excellence, Data Privacy, and Legal innovation”
Cover story
Shivani Joshi
Featured Profile - Shivani Joshi
The Translator in the Room
Every industry has a moment when two worlds that should be talking are not. In a conference room somewhere, a lawyer reads out a regulatory requirement. Across the table, an engineer nods politely and quietly wonders what it means for the database. Weeks later, the product ships, and nobody is quite sure whether it is compliant.
Shivani Joshi has spent her career in that gap. She is an engineer who went back to study law, not to become a courtroom advocate but because she kept seeing a problem others were either too specialised to notice or too busy to solve. “The problem wasn’t law. The problem wasn’t technology,” she says. “The real gap was translation.”
Today she is the founder of Stratify BA, a training venture that prepares professionals for roles at the meeting point of law, technology and business. She also founded Consentify, a new venture helping organisations put India’s data protection obligations into practice. Her credentials include an ISO 27001 Lead Auditor qualification and certification as a DSCI Certified Privacy Professional. They are the visible results of a path that took more than a decade to assemble, one deliberate step at a time.
A Student of Machines in the Marathwada Heartland
The story starts in Aurangabad, Maharashtra. Shivani’s pull towards computers came early. She began with a Diploma in Computer Engineering at Hi-tech Polytechnic College, then went on to a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science at the Marathwada Institute of Technology.
College life was not all code. She sat on the organising committees of campus events, entered presentation competitions and debates, and represented her college in badminton singles. Those habits, public speaking, structured argument and the discipline of a competitive sport, would later prove as useful as any algorithm. A founder who must convince a sceptical market that a new profession exists needs more than technical skill. She needs the ability to stand up and make the case.
Commanding the Data
After engineering, Shivani turned to data. A summer traineeship at Knorex in 2017 gave her a first taste of analytics, collecting raw data from sources such as Google and XPO, then turning it into reports and presentations. Between 2018 and 2019 she completed a postgraduate diploma in Data Science through Manipal Academy of Higher Education, earning an A grade while working alongside her studies. A short internship at Opulent Infotech, the company behind the agri tech platform Smartkheti, followed.
Then came the corporate years, roughly five of them. She worked as a Business Analyst at SamvadSocial Technologies in Pune, then as a Data Research Analyst and Business System Analyst at Data Axle, where dashboards and Power BI became part of her toolkit. In 2022 she joined Simplify Healthcare as a Business Analyst II, working in the US healthcare domain with a product based company.
She chose this path on purpose. “I deliberately wanted corporate exposure before starting something of my own,” she explains. She wanted to understand how products are built, how clients think, how requirements become technology and how businesses actually make decisions. Looking back, she treats those years as an apprenticeship for the entrepreneur she did not yet know she would become.
The Catalyst Question
In healthcare, the decisive moment was a small one. Clients would request product features, and the team could not judge those requests purely on business or technical merit. They first had to ask whether US law permitted the feature at all. A feature that delighted a client could still contradict a legal requirement.
Shivani found herself fascinated. Law was not an obstacle to be cleared before the real work began. It was part of the design. And the people on either side, she noticed, often could not understand one another.
The pull towards law was not entirely new. Her father is a lawyer, and she grew up admiring his confidence, his way of solving problems and the ease with which he dealt with people. As a young engineer, she had assumed that computers were her whole path. Now she began to suspect that law could complement her technical background rather than compete with it.
She acted on the suspicion in a way few professionals in the growing stage of their career would. While keeping her professional commitments, she pursued a Bachelor of Laws at Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth in Pune, graduating in 2022. She also earned a diploma in Cyber Law from the Asian School of Cyber Laws, and later sought further certification in privacy and data protection. From 2023 to 2024 she worked part time as a Legal Associate at Solitaire Associates, getting her first hands on look at how legal work really runs day to day.
Charting the Unknown
With engineering, data science, business analysis and law all behind her, Shivani had an unusual vantage point, and what she saw troubled her.
Legal teams were full of brilliant professionals, yet many were drowning in repetitive workflows, manual processes and disconnected systems. Technology teams were building automation tools and compliance platforms without always understanding how legal and regulatory teams actually work. In India, law students were being trained in traditional ways while regulation and technology moved at speed. Elsewhere in the world, legal technology and privacy were already established fields.
What India lacked, she concluded, was a profession that did not yet have a name. The Legal Business Analyst. This is someone who can read a regulation, map it onto a business process, specify what a system needs to do and see the work through to execution.
Seeing What Others Missed
The decision to build something was personal. Shivani had begun thinking seriously about entrepreneurship while expecting, and motherhood sharpened her resolve. “I knew I had responsibilities,” she says. “But I also felt that if I did not pursue the idea then, I might never do it.”
In January 2025 she founded Stratify BA. It meant leaving behind the security of a corporate career, one she could easily have continued, with her experience, in another well paying role. Instead she took on a harder task. Convincing the market that the problem she was solving existed at all.
The questions came quickly. What was Legal Business Analysis? Why would an engineer do an LLB? Would this ever become a real field? She had no ready proof, only conviction. Each sceptical question, in fact, strengthened her belief that there was a gap worth filling. Stratify’s offering, which she describes as India’s first Legal Business Analysis course, was designed to give law students and legal professionals practical skills for roles beyond the traditional legal path.
The Founder’s Crucible
Starting a company is hard. Starting one that must first explain itself is harder. Shivani describes her hardest period not as a single crisis but as an accumulation. There was the work of explaining a new category, finding the first students, building visibility, learning marketing, managing financial uncertainty and establishing credibility, all at once.
She was also doing it from home, with a young child and a newborn. Her days blended the roles of a one woman institution. She wrote the course content, recorded videos, prepared documents, taught live classes and produced marketing material. Some batches did not sell as hoped. Some ideas were dismissed. Some partnerships never came together. On the hardest days, financial pressure was serious enough that she asked herself whether she should continue at all.
Guilt was part of it too. She wondered whether she was giving her daughters enough of her time. She is candid that entrepreneurship and motherhood do not fit into tidy schedules. But she insists the experience made her more resolute rather than less. “Ambition does not disappear when you become a mother,” she says. “The way you pursue it simply has to become more resilient.”
The First Signs of Daylight
Validation did not arrive as applause. It arrived in quieter forms. Students began to enrol. Professionals began to understand why legal and technology skills belonged together. And learners began moving towards better professional opportunities because of what they had studied.
That last point matters most to her. Hearing that a concept is interesting is pleasant, she says, but watching a student use it to step into a better role is the real proof. The programme today spans Legal Business Analysis, Legal Operations, Contract Lifecycle Management, DPDP and data privacy, compliance workflows and legal tech tooling.
The hardship also reshaped the founder. She now makes decisions more independently, depends less on outside approval, thinks more strategically and takes calculated risks with greater confidence. Above all, she learned to read uncertainty differently. “Uncertainty doesn’t necessarily mean that something is wrong,” she says. “Sometimes it is simply what building something new looks like.”
From Mentorship to Movement
As Stratify grew, so did its audience. Alongside its professional courses, the company now runs corporate capability programmes. These include DPDP awareness workshops, data privacy readiness programmes, leadership privacy sessions, privacy awareness training for product and engineering teams, and broader law plus technology programmes.
Shivani’s approach is deliberately practical. Many organisations, she observes, struggle with privacy compliance not because they are careless but because their people do not know what compliance looks like in daily execution. A policy document does not tell a product manager what to build, or an engineer what to log, or a vendor manager what to ask. Her sessions try to answer those questions in the language each team actually speaks.
This work has a service dimension that is easy to overlook. By equipping students, working professionals and corporate teams with skills they can use immediately, she is helping build a workforce India’s regulatory future will need.
Why Privacy, and Why Now
India’s Digital Personal Data Protection framework gave her work a sharper edge. In her view, the law is widely misunderstood. Compliance, she argues, is not achieved by reading the legislation, drafting a policy and adding a consent checkbox to a website.
Real compliance requires an organisation to know what personal data it holds, why it holds it, where it travels, who can access it and which vendors touch it. It must manage consent and notices, answer requests from the people whose data it holds, respond to incidents, handle retention and deletion, and set up clear lines of accountability. Each of those is a process with owners, evidence and failure points.
This is where her unusual combination of skills stops being a curiosity and becomes an advantage. The lawyer understands the obligation. The technologist understands the system. The analyst understands the workflow. Privacy implementation needs all three in the same room, and Shivani is often the person who can sit in all three chairs.
Consentify: From Teaching to Building
In September 2026, Shivani launched Consentify, a venture aimed squarely at the DPDP compliance problem from both the technology and the legal side. If Stratify is about building capability in people, Consentify is about giving organisations a structure to act on it.
Its direction covers the practical machinery of privacy. Consent management, processing activity records, data subject request workflows, vendor management, incident handling, governance documentation, data retention and readiness assessment. The aim is to turn abstract obligations into repeatable workflows, with a clear owner, a clear step and a clear record of evidence.
She describes her own role as sitting at the intersection of product, technology, privacy and implementation. She calls it “The Translation Layer”. What the organisation actually has to do, who owns it and where technology can make the process more structured. The ambition is simple to state and hard to achieve. She wants privacy compliance to be practical, measurable and implementable rather than a document exercise.
The Currency of Experience
Shivani is generous with what her journey taught her, and the lessons are specific. A good idea does not automatically find a market, and when you introduce a new category, education becomes part of the business model. Doing everything yourself may be necessary at the start, but it cannot be the long term plan, and systems must eventually replace heroics.
Financial uncertainty taught her to separate conviction from assumption. Belief in an idea has to travel alongside a clear view of cash flow, market response and sustainability. And credibility, she has found, is earned through consistent work rather than claimed. In privacy, it is not enough to say you understand the law. You have to show you can turn it into something an organisation can run.
The People Behind the Founder
She credits a small circle of influences. Her father’s example of confident, independent problem solving shaped how she thinks about professional independence. Her years in business analysis taught her to ask the right questions, find the actual problem and translate requirements into outcomes. Her daughters, she says, forced a discipline about priorities that no business school could have taught, and gave the whole journey a deeper meaning. And the learners who have come through Stratify remain a daily source of proof that the intersection she identified is not merely theoretical.
A Word for the Next Generation
Asked what she would tell young professionals, Shivani begins with a warning against waiting. Do not hold out for the moment when you feel completely ready, she says. That moment rarely comes. But she is equally wary of the blind leap. Understand the problem, study the market, build the relevant skills, weigh the financial risk and then make a calculated decision.
She urges young people to consider interdisciplinary careers. In her view, the future will favour those who can connect domains rather than operate within a single silo. Her own path, from computer science and data science through business analysis, law, cyber law and privacy, is her evidence.
And she offers a reassurance to anyone building something unfamiliar. Early confusion does not mean an idea is wrong. “Sometimes you are simply early,” she says, “and sometimes you have not yet explained the value clearly enough.” Listen to criticism, test your assumptions and adapt, but do not abandon a meaningful idea simply because everyone does not understand it immediately.
The Road Ahead
Recognition, Shivani says, feels less like a destination than a responsibility. Her focus for the coming years is the full arc of privacy implementation, from helping organisations understand their obligations and assess their gaps to designing processes, assigning ownership and building a sustainable governance model. She wants to be known not merely as someone who can explain DPDP, but as someone who can lead an organisation through it.
There is a personal ambition alongside the professional one. She hopes her journey will show that entrepreneurship and motherhood need not be mutually exclusive. “The balance is rarely perfect,” she admits, “but both can coexist with purpose and persistence.”
The Mosaic of Innovation
Trace Shivani Joshi’s journey, and you see a masterclass in multidisciplinary brilliance. From a foundation in computer engineering and data science to business analysis, an LLB, cyber law, and privacy certifications, every chapter is a purposeful building block. Look at her work today, and the masterpiece comes into view. A seamless integration of technology, law, and business where every single piece connects to create something extraordinary.
That is the remarkable message of her story. Experience does not have to stay in separate compartments. The engineer’s logic, the analyst’s curiosity and the lawyer’s care for obligations can live in one professional, and when they do, they can build things that none of them could build alone.
“I did not begin with a perfectly defined roadmap,” she says. “I began with curiosity, corporate experience, a personal connection to law, an understanding of technology and a growing awareness of a market gap.” Today, as India’s organisations learn what it means to handle personal data responsibly, that gap is closing, and a good part of the bridge was built by a woman who refused to choose between her two professions.
“I am still building,” she says. “But I now know that the intersection I once had to explain is exactly where I want to be.”