Sheetal Tripathy joins Netflix as counsel, music business affairs

MUMBAI: Ten years at one firm, and then Netflix comes calling. Sheetal Tripathy, the music rights specialist who spent the best part of a decade cutting her teeth at Khimani & Associates, has jumped ship to join Netflix as counsel, music business affairs, based out of Mumbai.

Tripathy is no stranger to the trickier corners of India’s music business. Over her career she has advised artists, record labels, distributors and publishers on commercial and legal strategy, while also guiding clients through cross-border deals and the thorny business of multinationals trying to muscle into the domestic market. Infringement matters, too, have been firmly within her wheelhouse.

Her journey at Khimani & Associates tells its own story of a decade-long climb. She joined as an associate in June 2016, moved up to senior associate by June 2018, a role she held for over five years, before being elevated to associate partner in September 2023. She stayed in that seat until May 2026, clocking close to ten years at the firm in total. Before Khimani, she spent ten months as an associate at Gandhi & Associates in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, starting in August 2015.

Announcing the move, Tripathy said she was “excited” to be starting this new chapter, taking up the counsel role at Netflix from June 2026.

For Netflix, the hire slots neatly into its growing appetite for in-house legal muscle on the music side, as the streaming giant continues to deepen its ties with artists, labels and publishers across one of the world’s most complex and fastest-evolving music markets. For Tripathy, it marks the end of a decade-long innings in private practice, and the start of a very different one inside the world’s biggest streaming boardroom.