Unique Contributions

Gaythri Raman - Rule of Law campaigner

• Gaythri Raman • Season 1 • Episode 4

Share episode

What is the rule of law, what does it mean in practice and why does it matter?
Gaythri Raman has dedicated a large part of her career to advance the rule of law. In this episode, YS asks Gaythri what it takes to meaningfully advance the rule of law around the world and about the role that technology can play in that journey. Based in South East Asia, Gaythri shares the stories that have changed her life and the lives of others to create a more equal society.

Gaythri Raman is managing director of LexisNexis South East Asia.

This podcast is brought to you by RELX.

YS Chi:

The Unique Contributions podcast is brought to you by RELX. Find out more about us by visiting RELX.com

Gaythri Raman:

You and I can talk today about the impact we're making on society and how many lives we will change with the good work that we do, but the joy and fulfilment and the goosebump moments that doing this kind of work has given to me. It is something that I would never trade for the world.

YS Chi:

Hello, and welcome to Unique Contributions, a RELX Podcast, where we bring you closer to some of the most interesting people from around our business. I'm YS Chi, and I'll be exploring with my guests some of the big issues that matter to society, how they are making a difference, and what brought them to where they are today. This week, we're talking about the rule of law. It remains under threat all around the world, and even established democracies cannot take it for granted. I'm delighted to be joined by Gaythri Raman, who is managing director of LexisNexis in Southeast Asia. Gaythri has made it her mission to help advance the rule of law in her region. Hi, Gaythri. Welcome.

Gaythri Raman:

Hi YS. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.

YS Chi:

You've been with Lex sNexis for almost two dec des, and have taken up a var ety of roles and tracks wit in the business. From st rting on as an online legal re earch trainer. You've been a pr duct manager, sales manager, ma keting manager, and finally no the managing director of our en ire Southeast Asia region. To pu it simply, how did you get th re? What inspired you? And wh have you chosen to stay with us for such a big part of your jo rney?

Gaythri Raman:

Yeah, that is interesting. I love talking about this story. I come from humble beginnings. I come from a small little town called Sungai Siput. It's about 200 kilometres north of Kuala Lumpur, my parents still live there. My dad is Indian, my mum is Chinese. Both of them were born in this land before the country's independence from British rule. So their mixed race union was ve y rare during those times. I gu ss my sister and I just grew up in a culture where we co stantly were encouraged to qu stion something, if we were comp lled to follow the norm. We were encouraged to speak up if some hing didn't seem right, or fair And that's why I've always love the law. And I've always been very set on going to law scho l. And that's what I did. I full intended to practice law and ecome a hot shot human righ s lawyer. And I was waiting for y results after completing law chool and completing the exam, and I just happen to clic on a job advertisement by Lexi Nexis. That was 2001. I was hire as a online legal research trai er. So my job was to teach the egal market here in Mala sia at that time, how to cond ct online legal research when people were more familiar with the books and printed mate ial. And that's how my jour ey began. And I must say that at every critical part of my j urney, you mentioned so many roles that I've been in. I had really, really good leader in L xisNexis, who pushed me when I needed to be pushed, who enco raged me and inspired me when I needed it at all the righ times.

YS Chi:

I think that you touched on something really important, which is having people like teachers, mentors, leaders, parents, that push you right? So do you think that that is something that you see often around you, or do you think you just got lucky?

Gaythri Raman:

I think it's a combination of both. I think if you are a worthy mentee, the mentors will be attracted to you. But if you are not interested, and if you're not exhibiting the enthusiasm and the excitement that would attract a mentor, then the mentor will be attracted to someone else. So it works both ways.

YS Chi:

Right. Clearly, your passion and your hard work shows and I'm sure all those who are willing to help you teach, step up for that reason. Just last summer, you won the CMO Asia's Women Leaders award for your excellence in this field of work. Congratulations.

Gaythri Raman:

Thank you.

YS Chi:

What does that recognition mean to you both in personal and professional terms?

Gaythri Raman:

It made me do a lot of thinking, to be honest. It made me realise that this wasn't just my journey. It was bigger than that. It is the journey of all who come to know my story. It is the journey of all who follow me, and all who are watching me, and I am, who I am. And I'm giving out a signal to others who have barriers, who may have challenges, who may have questions. And because I've stayed true to myself, and I'm currently being celebrated, I think it is a signal that everyone needs to be the best version of themselves. And the recognition will come.

YS Chi:

Now that you've done so much, and been recognised so often, how are you then turning it around, and exhibiting the mentorship now to women and men who are aware of your journey, and want to take part of your journey?

Gaythri Raman:

I love it. I just tweeted about a week ago and said I need interns. The Malaysian government announced the postponement of the bar exams, and it was supposed to be held in September, and it's been postponed to March. And so what I tweeted was, hey, of those of you who are waiting to take your exams, I need interns. Come and work with me. And that's how I feel like I am also inspired because the next generation of talent and people, give a lot of meaning to what you're doing.

YS Chi:

When people that know you within the company think of Gaythri, they equate to rule of law. And as you also know, we at RELX really focus on doing business with a purpose. So like me, at Elsevier, it's about helping researchers and healthcare professionals to advance health, scientific research, innovation. For you at LexisNexis, it's about advancing the rule of law. And without a doubt, you and your colleagues have made some huge strides in this area. So before we get into detail, can you explain what is rule of law? And why is it so important?

Gaythri Raman:

Okay, it's very simple. LexisNexis has broken it down. Our LexisNexis rule of law equation is made up of the following. Number one, equality under the law. Number two, transparency of the law, you need to know what it is right? Number three, independent judiciary. Of course, if someone is supposed to decide on your fate, you want that person not to be influenced. And number four, accessible legal remedy. You need to know that you can get your fair share of justice. It is a social infrastructure. Without it, we cannot have a functioning society. We help to build it. We help to build the infrastructure, we maintain the infrastructure with the work that we do. We make sure that it works. And I cannot stress enough how rare that is that we are in the business of directly impacting society for the better. And our rule of law impact tracker actually demonstrates this and helps us visualise it. It can be quite confronting. It is a tool which uses data from the World Justice Project, the World Bank, Transparency International. And then it puts the data together to help users visualise what is possible if the rule of law grows around the world.

YS Chi:

Right. Can you just go one more step in that and say, how are you combining this kind of data, and our content through technology? I'm very curious because technology comes up all the time when we talk about rule of law.

Gaythri Raman:

Technology used to be for those who could afford it. Or for those who could venture into it or undertake it. It seemed like an undertaking, a big deal if we needed to invest in technology. Now, technology is an enabler. So, a simple example is that, if you have a mobile phone with you, which is way cheaper than a standard laptop, or you know, desktop, and you have access to the internet, you can get information. And if we at LexisNexis make that information, bitesize, digestible, understandable to people. People in the most rural areas, people who are not rich who don't have that kind of means, they will have access to knowledge and information. And that is what is going to elevate everybody's position in society to make it a fairer society, and to be honest, level the playing field for everyone as well.

YS Chi:

Right. So let's take a couple of examples of things that you have been doing. Since you're in Malaysia. Let's start there and talk about LexisNexis' mobile courts. Can you give us a little bit more backstory behind this mobile expedition? What was the motivating factor? And how is the progress so far?

Gaythri Raman:

Sure. This was in 2018, early 2018. And we sat down, my leadership team and I and we said, there are a lot of issues that we don't know often, we don't understand related to the indigenous communities. And the majority of them live in East Malaysia, so the state of Sabah. So we went and met with the minister of law and native rights. And we also worked with an NGO to go into the jungle of Sabah, and meet with the indigenous community in Sabah. Just to understand what their challenges are, what their issues are, and how is it different from the average person in peninsular Malaysia. We learnt that the most challenging barrier that they have to equality and getting access to basic needs was the fact that they were finding it really, really difficult to register the births of their children. Because they live so far away. They just found it too challenging, too hard, and so they didn't do it. And the result is that you become stateless. And when you become stateless, you don't get access to health care, you don't get access to the government schools, you basically don't have an identity. And so we came back to the peninsula and we set an appointment with the chief justice and met with him. And then we said to him, you know, they need help, and how can we help and how can we work together? And he just looked at us and he looked at me and he said, I'd like to invite you to the mobile court expeditions. I didn't know what it was then. And then I realised that it is a expedition organised by the courts of Sabah, the High Court of Sabah, spearheaded by the Chief Justice, and they actually go into the jungles, the interiors of Borneo. And they bring the entire legal community and the court system to the jungle. Which means you have magistrates, you have high court judges, you have the Sabah Law Society, you have lawyers. They also bring people from the registration department. They bring the people from the Ministry of Health. It's a huge expedition of about 45, four wheel drives. So the first time we joined, about four of us went. We had to camp because this is really in the indigenous jungles so the communities can't spare rooms or their homes for us. And we spent the weekend with the indigenous communities. And the next morning, the courts were set up. So there were 14 court rooms. They were all sworn in. We, LexisNexis were observers and our role was to disseminate the information to the people in the peninsula, and to bring our knowledge and our understanding and summarise it in a way that policymakers would be able to take note and understand it. And we'll be able to create the right policies in support of the indigenous community and statelessness in future. It was life changing. I hadn't realised that people were living in this way and needed this kind of basic support from people like us. We had children who came to register their birth, late registration, and all they wanted was to go to school. There was a 14 year old girl who was taking her exams the next day, and she trekked for 24 hours across the jungle to get to our court. And she didn't even stop for lunch because she had to rush home to take her math exam. We have been issued a standing invitation to the mobile courts. So we have been going every year, and different people from my team join me. And I honestly expected a lot of them to hesitate because of how tough it is. But there is a long line of Southeast Asia employees who really, really want to go,

YS Chi:

Sure it's a life altering experience, right?

Gaythri Raman:

Yes, it is. It definitely is.

YS Chi:

Well, I think it's remarkable. I hope you are capturing some of these things in diaries and video clips and whatnot.

Gaythri Raman:

Yes, yes. We've been rolling out videos, we've come back and organised to roundtable discussions with policymakers in Kuala Lumpur. We have met with Law Society leaders on how to add and strengthen pro bono support for the mobile court as well. And we were supposed to go this year, if not for the pandemic. So we are definitely going to be back next year as well,ight.

YS Chi:

Right. Now, why don't we jump to another place where I know, I think might have been the first time I met you, which was when you were working on Myanmar. You made a pretty life changing trip there as well in the summer of 2013, which ultimately led to many of our current LexisNexis initiatives in the country. In fact, I think you managed to rope in one of my good friends, Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon of the United Nations, in the process of supporting the rebuilding advancement of the rule of law in that country. Can you share with us a story about that, and how your continuingly helping, it wasn't a one incident?

Gaythri Raman:

I'm going to come to a mini surprise for you YS. I'm gonna build this up, and you're gonna love the ending of this story. So, my journey began when I was alerted to the plight and the needs of Myanmar with regard to the rule of law, sometime in the spring of 2013. And a customer of ours actually just sent me an email out of the blue. He and I had been working together in Singapore, he is Singaporean. He used to be Burmese. I didn't know that. And we had worked together. He was the CEO of the Singapore International Arbitration Centre, and he said to me in his emails, very simple one

paragraph and said:

I have a friend. He's doing really good work, advancing the rule of law in Myanmar. He needs help. And I know you do a lot of rule of law work in the region. Can you help him, and may I connect you? And I said yes, sure connect me. And the following day, I ended up speaking to Mr. Robert Pe. Robert Pe is half Burmese. His grandfather used to be a Burmese Supreme Court judge. And it turns out that Robert was the legal adviser for Aung San Suu Kyi. Aung San Suu Kyi at that time had been released for a couple of years, and she was still in the opposition. She was the leader of the opposition party. But she was parliamentary chairman of the rule of law committee. So we started talking, and he talked about the fact that people didn't have transparency of the law. People didn't know what the law was. They were passing laws in Parliament, but they were fledgling democracy. They didn't know what it was. They were under military rule for 50 years, and now overnight they are told to debate sophisticated bills in Parliament. They just were overwhelmed. And so he asked me to visit Myanmar. And I said yes, and I ended up making this was truly a life changing trip for me, to Myanmar. And during the two weeks that I was there, I met with leaders of the various bar associations, I met with the law schools. I met with the Attorney General, the Supreme Court, and I also met with Aung San Suu Kyi. She was, is, one of the most inspiring people that I have had the honour to meet, because she's such a strong person. And she's someone who doesn't look back. We never discussed what she suffered or any of the indignities that were going on. We just discussed how we could work together and partner to support and help Myanmar advance the rule of law. And that began a journey that is continuing to this day. I was scheduled to attend a rule of law event in New York, where then Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon was going to deliver a keynote address. I knew it, and I thought to myself, he's going to be there in the same room. I need to meet him. I need five minutes with him. So I emailed my boss, the CEO of Asia at that time, he then connected with the global CEO, Mike Walsh. And then Mike then connected with you. So just just look at how many of my bosses helped me. They didn't just pat me on the back. My bosses worked, rolled up their sleeves to help me and YS you know this, you know I met with him, you were sitting next to him, I was so nervous I had, you know. And he, I remember, he just gave me a few names. And I followed up with them and I launched a monthly rule of law coordination meeting chaired by the UNDP, to be held in the UNDP office. You and I can talk today about the impact we're making on society, and you know, how many lives we will change with the good work that we do. But the joy and fulfilment and the goosebump moments that doing this kind of work has given to me, it is something that I would never trade for the world.

YS Chi:

Yeah, it is three dimensional. It is 360 degrees. It is giving and taking, and this is why we call it the unique contributions. This is, in doing what we do professionally, and expanding the impact far larger than any P&L. And I am really heartened to hear your enthusiasm and passion through real experiences like this in Malaysia, in Myanmar and many other countries. There is a clear sense of shared collective mission here, right? And vision for advancing the rule of law, all the way from top to bottom, bottom to top. This is all about practical projects. It's not conceptual, this is really practical. So as you look forward to getting more rule of law involvement and advancement, what are some of the big ambitions you have?

Gaythri Raman:

I think it's twofold. One is to find people who are passionate, to find people who like me seven years ago had no idea what the opportunities out there were, but we were seeking them. So that's one component. We need to find those people within LexisNexis, within the RELX group. We need to nurture them. We need to also have a structure and a plan in place to attract these kinds of people from outside and bring them into our organisation. People who are doing good work to change the world for the better, are automatically passionate people who will not give up. Because the problems that we are solving are big big problems which mean the business problems that they will solve are way smaller in comparison, and helps you gain perspective as well. That's one component. The second component is to make sure that we are focused on the projects and the work that we do to impact change. So we need to make sure that we are leveraging on and utilising on our skills, our knowledge, our connections, our network, our customers. So don't attempt something that is too far away from what your core skills are. Stick to that, and you will make the most impact. So what we're doing right now is going to institutions and talking to them at an equal footing. Consulting with them, giving them our expertise. Not being their vendors or trying to sell something to them, but actually imparting our knowledge to support them.

YS Chi:

Finding people who are passionate, making sure we focus on projects that have measurable impact. This is something that we do across all of RELX businesses. And in fact, when I think about rule of law, and as you said before, making information available. It also starts from simple things like having good educated population so they can actually read, write, and be able to understand the law and what their rights are. So I think that this is a truly 360 degree thing. It's not just one angle.

Gaythri Raman:

Exactly.

YS Chi:

Is COVID pandemic having an impact in your work for rule of law?

Gaythri Raman:

Yes, definitely. I will share two different stories that shows very different impact. One is Malaysia. A very strict lockdown was imposed for the first time in March with barely 48 hours notice. The country was actually scrambling. None of us had ever experienced a lockdown before. So the minute the Prime Minister announced the lockdown, the Federal Court of Malaysia called us and they said, we've been told to lock down. We are not set up for any of this at all. We're not sure how to do it, can you be our business continuity partner? So we set up a structure where we were the front liners for all the judges in the superior courts to refer to, for their research needs. Secondly, was also, we found out that the court website, which usually uploads cases into the website, the latest cases, wasn't being uploaded and wasn't being managed at that time. So we reached out to all the judges individually, and we said, send us all your judgments, we will make it available immediately, within 48 hours. Within a weekend, we actually set up a free site for case law. And we were at that point in time, the only place that anyone in the country could get access to case law. And we gave it out for free because we knew what it meant. The second story is the Myanmar Supreme Court. So we had signed a contract with them, and we were going to build a case law publishing platform for the Supreme Court. But then COVID happened, travel restrictions were put in place and we knew that we would have to work with them virtually. And then we found out that a lot of people were, you know, who are based in Myanmar were originally from other countries, and they were leaving because they were afraid of the pandemic and the impact. So everybody was going home. And so they thought, oh LexisNexis a foreign company, they're going to leave us too. And they just came to us and said, no, please don't leave us. We said no, we are here, we are holding your hand the whole time. But what we said was you need to commit. We will help you but you need to also commit to learning how to communicate and interact with us virtually. And we started training them and teaching them and they started learning how to use the virtual networks. They started learning how to use virtual calls, video calls as well. So we found that we could do it. And that it opens up a lot of possibilities for us in terms of our capacity. You know, it means we can do things virtually, we save a lot of time. A lot more of us can donate more of our time, as well, and the possibilities have just been increased.

YS Chi:

There's always silver lining.

Gaythri Raman:

Exactly, exactly.

YS Chi:

I have a very unfair question to you Gaythri.

Gaythri Raman:

Okay.

YS Chi:

You obviously exhibit incredible passion and commitment. If not law, what would you have done?

Gaythri Raman:

I would probably have entered politics, YS.

YS Chi:

You mean elected politics?

Gaythri Raman:

Yes, elected. But I would have been an MP. I would have been asking the tough questions. I've always wanted to change the world. So I would have been attracted to a role and work, that would enable me to change the world the best that I know how.

YS Chi:

And it's not too late.

Gaythri Raman:

That is true.

YS Chi:

Well, other people from RELX group have entered into public service in elected offices. So I don't think it's too late.

Gaythri Raman:

Yes.

YS Chi:

But I have to say, we've been speaking with a Gaytrhi, whom I call a captain of rule of law. Thank you so much Gaythri for sharing your passion about rule of law, and demonstrating that with that kind of determination and commitment, and strong relationships, it is possible to achieve meaningful change. Thank you so much.

Gaythri Raman:

Thank you YS. Appreciate the opportunity.

YS Chi:

Thank you also to our listeners for tuning in. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button on your podcast app to get new episodes as soon as they're released. And next week, we'll be talking to Steven Topliss of LexisNexis Risk Solutions about cybercrime and digital identities. Thank you for listening.