An institution that holds
two realities together.
Legal responsibility is carried centrally. Legal execution happens locally. In the space between these two realities — across borders, systems, and time — the International Jurisdictions Council exists.
Explore Our Instruments →What IJC exists to do.
The International Jurisdictions Council exists to hold together two realities that increasingly operate across borders but rarely align in practice: legal responsibility carried centrally within organisations, and legal execution carried out locally within jurisdiction-bound systems that behave very differently from how they are described.
Between responsibility and execution, clarity is often lost.
A General Counsel makes a decision in London about a matter that will be executed in Lagos or Mumbai or Riyadh. The decision is based on the best available intelligence — law firm memos, desk research, statutory analysis. But the execution unfolds in a system where enforcement timelines differ from statutory promises, where regulatory decisions depend on political context as much as legal merit, and where a judgment obtained can take years to translate into recovery.
This gap between how legal systems are described and how they actually behave is not a marginal problem. It is where value is lost, where disputes escalate, and where the cost of cross-border legal exposure becomes consequential. IJC exists to close it — or at minimum to make it visible before it becomes irreversible.
What IJC is. What it is not.
An institution's identity is defined as much by what it refuses to become as by what it creates. These refusals are not limitations — they are the source of IJC's value.
Suman Arora.
Suman Arora is the founding Director of the International Jurisdictions Council. She established IJC from a conviction that the global legal profession lacked the institutional infrastructure to bridge the gap between cross-border legal responsibility carried centrally and cross-border legal execution carried out locally.
Her work at IJC centres on the designation framework, the Global Legal Readiness Index™, the Assembly of Global General Counsel, and the institutional architecture that makes the system operate with credibility rather than commercial convenience.
sumanarora@theijc.orgAccess IJC's full institutional intelligence.
Complete GLRI profiles across 80 jurisdictions, quarterly intelligence briefings, and the Executive Orientation Desk — available to Assembly Fellows and institutional subscribers.