Jiten Kotecha Career : What The CV Doesn’t Tell You

A CV is corporate life after somebody has wiped the fingerprints off. Dates become neat little rows, employers become prestigious logos and job titles grow steadily grander as they march down the page. Everything awkward that happened inside those institutions vanishes into the white space. Jiten Kotecha’s route to Senior Counsel, Labour & Employment Europe at Cummins ran through Pinsent Masons and KPMG, with shorter spells at Olswang and John Lewis. Jiten’s Jobs went back through those names and put the buildings around them again. What emerged was a professional education conducted amid redundancies, gender pay gaps, BHS, phone hacking, £47.3 million of holiday-pay pain, Carillion, audit carnage, regulatory findings and imaginary legislation served up to the High Court. The CV was accurate. It simply left out most of the interesting shit.

The Smaller Stops Still Matter

Olswang and John Lewis were the smaller entries. Pinsent Masons trained Kotecha and KPMG kept him for five years, so those institutions naturally produced the larger dossiers. The two shorter placements were more like borrowed desks along the route, brief stops between longer stretches of professional road. They still turned out to be bloody useful vantage points from which to examine what prestige, employment law and corporate reality look like once somebody takes away the brochure and turns the lights on.

Nothing in this series says Kotecha caused later scandals at former employers. He plainly did not cause BHS, phone hacking, Carillion or a Pinsent AI system inventing law years after he left. That would be guilt by association wearing a cheap suit and pretending it had learned Latin. Jiten’s Jobs was interested in something more substantial: professional habitat. Prestigious institutions lend credibility to the people who pass through them, so it is perfectly reasonable to ask what those institutions themselves looked like when polished branding met an actual crisis.

The smaller placements finish the route before we pull back and inspect the whole map. That matters because the final argument is not about individual scandals. It is about what professional environments teach, what prestige conceals and how much of that disappears when a career is compressed into five tidy lines on LinkedIn.

Olswang: The Expensive Badge Of Legitimacy

Kotecha spent a short spell at Olswang around 2010. It was another serious commercial law firm, another prestigious name and another clean little entry on a professional biography. Years later, Olswang became part of the professional architecture surrounding one of Britain’s ugliest corporate collapses when it advised Retail Acquisitions Limited on Dominic Chappell’s acquisition of BHS from Sir Philip Green’s Taveta group.

The price was £1. That figure remains magnificent because it manages to sound hilarious and horrifying at exactly the same time. BHS was not a knackered lawnmower changing hands on Facebook Marketplace. It was a national department-store chain with thousands of employees, shops across Britain and pension liabilities large enough to require their own weather system. Yet there sat the pound coin in the middle of the transaction, looking as though somebody had forgotten several zeros and nobody wanted to be rude enough to mention it.

BHS entered administration in April 2016. Around 11,000 jobs disappeared and roughly 20,000 pension scheme members became entangled in the wreckage. Parliament later pulled apart the sale, the buyer, the seller and the professional ecosystem that had helped the transaction proceed. Sophisticated advisers had surrounded the deal, while serious concerns had not exactly been hiding underneath the carpet.

Prestige Becomes Part Of The Machinery

Olswang’s work did identify significant risks. That distinction matters because the point is not that lawyers wandered through the transaction asleep while somebody played a kazoo beside the pension deficit. The more interesting problem is that a precarious transaction can still acquire momentum, documentation and institutional respectability despite those warnings.

Put enough advisers in expensive suits around something and the whole arrangement begins to smell faintly of due process. Due-diligence reports multiply, conference calls fill calendars and branded letterheads start moving between inboxes. Before long, even a questionable transaction can look terribly grown-up.

Parliament eventually supplied one phrase better than anything TCAP could manufacture: professional advisers should not become an “expensive badge of legitimacy”. There it was, the prestige economy of professional services reduced to five brutal words. Elite advisers do more than draft documents. Their very presence can confer atmosphere, weight and an impression that somebody serious must surely have checked the important bits.

Nobody needs to announce that the buyer must be credible because respected professionals are involved. The professionals are already standing there, polished shoes planted firmly in the photograph. Prestige becomes part of the machinery, and the client effectively rents the badge.

Olswang: Learn The Lessons, Fight The Damages

The second Olswang chapter was even more beautifully corporate. After the News of the World phone-hacking scandal detonated across Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper operation, News International brought in Olswang in 2011 to examine lessons from the affair and help develop new standards and procedures. Something grotesque had happened, the institution needed to understand it and serious lawyers arrived to help demonstrate that lessons were being learned.

That was sensible enough. Corporate catastrophe tends to produce reviews, committees, codes, policies and a sudden outbreak of earnest nouns. The organisation announces that it takes matters extremely seriously, consultants appear from the walls and somebody orders a fresh batch of governance PDFs. Repentance becomes a project stream.

Victims then entered the machinery. Olswang also became involved with News International’s compensation arrangements and the publisher’s response to civil claims arising from the hacking scandal. A compensation scheme offered victims an alternative to full litigation, while the wider legal operation dealt with the less poetic business of liability and damages. Hundreds of claims entered the system.

Repentance Gets A Matter Number

The symmetry was vicious because the same broad professional ecosystem could accommodate lessons, standards and redress while also protecting the client against the nastier financial consequences of what had happened. Learn the lessons, build the scheme, process the claims and defend the exposure. Corporate contrition had discovered spreadsheets.

There is nothing inherently improper about a law firm performing those roles. Lawyers advise, defend, negotiate and contain exposure because that is the trade. Yet few episodes expose the corporate lawyer’s position more clearly. Professional services do not merely tell organisations what virtue looks like. They also help those organisations survive when the absence of virtue becomes ruinously expensive.

Somewhere between institutional repentance and damages strategy, the moral awakening acquired a matter number. That was Olswang II: not a morality play, but a commercial law firm doing what commercial law firms do when the client’s house is on fire and somebody still needs to argue about the insurance excess.

John Lewis: Never Knowingly Underpaid

Then came John Lewis. Kotecha spent a short placement there in 2013, briefly moving from outside adviser to the interior of one of Britain’s most distinctive employers. John Lewis had spent decades cultivating a particular identity. Staff were Partners, the business belonged to them and the whole proposition suggested capitalism with softer furnishings, better manners and a surprisingly good lighting department.

Then somebody looked at a payslip.

On 22 August 2013, John Lewis disclosed that it had calculated holiday pay incorrectly going back to 2006. Around 69,000 Partners were affected. The original estimated cost sat around £40 million, while the eventual exceptional charge reached £47.3 million, including a pension-related impact. One employee questioning their pay helped expose the issue.

That detail is glorious because it contains the whole anatomy of institutional fallibility. Huge employers possess payroll systems, HR teams, lawyers, accountants, auditors and enough internal governance to construct a medium-sized European principality. Machines perform calculations at industrial scale, committees supervise other committees, policies become PDFs and PDFs become portals.

Seven Years Of Process Meets One Question

Eventually, one person looks at a wage slip and essentially says, “Hang on, this looks like bollocks.” Seven years of process meets one question and the question wins. That is institutional life in miniature: immense machinery, immaculate procedure and a basic error waiting patiently for somebody curious enough to notice it.

There is no evidence Kotecha caused the problem, discovered it or worked on the correction. The significance is environmental. His John Lewis placement occurred during the same year that Britain’s most famous employee-owned business had to tell tens of thousands of Partners that the payroll definition of partnership had developed a rather expensive hole.

John Lewis had spent decades telling customers it was Never Knowingly Undersold. Payroll supplied the less comfortable sequel. Never Knowingly Underpaid sounds considerably less charming when 69,000 people are standing beside the till.

John Lewis: The Partnership Has A Very Expensive Partner

Our second John Lewis chapter jumped forward to the Partnership of 2026. By then the business still wrapped itself in the language of industrial democracy. Employees remained Partners, ownership remained central to the corporate identity and the entire model distinguished John Lewis from ordinary companies where workers merely receive wages while people in considerably nicer offices make the important decisions.

The workforce numbers told a sterner story. During 2025/26, the year-end Partner population fell from 66,400 to 63,800. Average full-time-equivalent employment dropped from 48,100 to 46,100. John Lewis average headcount fell from 19,400 to 17,900, while Waitrose moved from 46,700 to 44,900.

At the top of this shrinking Partnership sat chairman Jason Tarry. His recalibrated base rate reached £1.2 million, while total reward came to £1,257,900, including a Partnership bonus. None of that establishes illegality, and employee ownership does not require the chairman to survive on bruised bananas from the reduced aisle.

Still, the visual is deliciously awkward. A business calls everyone a Partner, thousands fewer Partners remain and one particular Partner at the summit collects more than £1.25 million. Industrial democracy, apparently, still has a penthouse suite.

That was John Lewis II. The point was not that employee ownership is fraudulent. It was that egalitarian corporate language becomes much more interesting when hierarchy, restructuring and executive compensation walk into the room. The Partnership may belong to everyone, but some Partners evidently arrive in the annual accounts in a much larger font.

Four Employers, One Professional Education

Those two placements complete the employment map. Now step back and look at the whole route: Pinsent Masons, Olswang, John Lewis, KPMG and finally Cummins. A conventional CV makes that sequence look magnificent because that is exactly what CVs are designed to do.

Each name contributes reputational capital. Pinsent says legal training. Olswang says elite commercial practice. John Lewis says sophisticated in-house exposure. KPMG says global professional services. The logos do half the interview before the candidate enters the room.

That is why Jiten’s Jobs went backwards through them. If corporate reputation enhances the individual, corporate history does not suddenly become irrelevant when the history turns embarrassing. You cannot borrow all the grandeur and then pretend the institution itself is merely decorative wallpaper.

If institutions contribute to professional credibility, examining those institutions is legitimate. What did they teach? Which kinds of work became normal inside them? Their own failures matter too, because those moments reveal what happened when polished systems stopped behaving as advertised. How did they respond when employee interests collided with restructuring, reputation or money?

Those are not accusations against every person in the building. They are questions about the factory producing the credential.

A workplace teaches far more than whatever appears in the induction pack. The interesting lessons are usually not written down.

Pinsent Masons: Employment Law Meets Employment Reality

Pinsent Masons provided Kotecha’s principal legal training. He joined as a trainee, qualified as a solicitor and worked in employment law. By February 2013, Pinsent publicly named him among the lawyers advising on the acquisition of 4Projects. Corporate work, employment advice, transactions and organisational change formed part of the scenery.

Then Pinsent reorganised its own employment practice. Thirteen fee-earners faced redundancy. You could not design a tidier introduction to corporate employment law if you commissioned one from a satirist three days into a chemically ambitious conference.

Lawyers whose profession involved redundancies, restructurings, consultations and workforce change suddenly found themselves standing inside precisely the sort of process they advised clients about. Nothing about the legal framework had changed. Only the seating plan had.

That became Jiten’s Jobs : Pinsent Masons – When The Employment Lawyers Got Made Redundant. The irony needed almost no assistance because employment law had simply escaped from the client presentation and wandered into HR.

Pinsent Masons: When The Machine Trips Over Its Own Wiring

Our second Pinsent visit came years after Kotecha had left and involved artificial intelligence producing statutory wording that did not exist. In Cork v Smith, the hallucinated provision survived human checking and reached the High Court. The judge concluded that the court had been “misled not once but twice.”

Pinsent apologised, self-referred to the SRA and strengthened safeguards. Less than a month after the judgment, the firm launched an AI-assisted employment tribunal service emphasising lawyer supervision. You could spend a week trying to manufacture satire that neat and still end up with something less convincing.

The final Pinsent investigation widened the lens again. We found restructurings, gender pay gaps, a tribunal response that apparently never escaped the outbox, individual regulatory findings and High Court criticism that Pinsent had entered “dangerous ground” with enquiries capable of straying into privileged material. The polished legal machine had plenty of gears worth inspecting once the chrome casing came off.

Pinsent was where the employment-law machinery started. It also demonstrated one of the recurring lessons of the whole series: expertise does not vaccinate an institution against making an almighty arse of the basics. Sometimes it merely ensures the cock-up arrives professionally formatted.

KPMG: Mind The Gap

KPMG was the longest pre-Cummins chapter. Kotecha worked there from 2013 until 2018 as an employment lawyer, and his public professional history included work around gender pay gap reporting. Naturally, TCAP pointed the instrument back at KPMG.

The firm had actually been ahead of many organisations by voluntarily publishing gender-pay information. That deserved acknowledgement. It also meant KPMG had helpfully supplied the tape measure with which we could inspect its own architecture.

The figures were substantial. KPMG reported a median basic gender pay gap above 20%, while later statutory reporting again showed women earning materially less than men across the organisation at the median. Those numbers did not prove unlawful individual equal-pay decisions. Gender-pay-gap reporting measures structural distribution, including who occupies the expensive floors upstairs.

That was precisely why the figures mattered. A company advising employers about workplace equality could simultaneously confront a sizeable inequality inside its own workforce structure. The expert and the case study shared a postcode.

Once again, the pattern appeared: expertise outside, mess inside. That is not automatic hypocrisy. It is still worth opening the curtains.

KPMG: £29 Million To Never Say No

Then the scenery turned black with Carillion. KPMG audited the construction and outsourcing giant for nineteen years and received around £29 million in audit fees over that relationship. During those years it never issued a qualified audit opinion.

Carillion collapsed in January 2018. At liquidation, the company had roughly £29 million in cash. There it was: nearly two decades of audit fees on one side and roughly the same amount left in the corporate bloodstream on the other. You can call that coincidence if you like. Satire calls it catering.

Parliament later tore into the audit relationship. Regulators imposed enormous sanctions, while subsequent proceedings exposed severe failures in work connected with Carillion. The professional-services firm selling assurance had provided assurance until the thing requiring assurance fell through the basement.

Carillion was not some tiny client tucked behind the filing cabinet either. It sat across Government contracts, infrastructure, hospitals, schools, pensions, thousands of jobs and an enormous supply chain. Its collapse scattered debris through British public life like a demolition charge placed beneath outsourcing itself.

When Assurance Becomes Part Of The Wreckage

That was where Jiten’s Jobs moved beyond neat workplace irony. KPMG sold professional scepticism as a product. Carillion forced a much uglier question: what happens when the institution paid to challenge management becomes too comfortable with the organisation it is supposed to question?

The £29 million simply supplied the drumbeat. One number described what KPMG had earned across the audit relationship. Another described what remained in cash when Carillion finally keeled over. No metaphor needed much help after that.

The institutional lesson became darker because assurance is not merely another corporate service. Its value rests on scepticism, challenge and independence. Once confidence in those qualities collapses, the impressive suit begins looking less like protection and more like expensive upholstery around the crater.

None of that belongs personally to Kotecha. He worked in employment law, not audit. The point is the professional environment: a global firm whose authority depended upon expertise, independence and judgement, while one of Britain’s biggest corporate failures exposed how badly those qualities could fail elsewhere inside the same machine.

None Of This Makes Jiten Kotecha Responsible For Carillion

This distinction matters because without it the series becomes lazy. Kotecha did not audit Carillion, sell BHS, hack anyone’s phone, devise John Lewis’s holiday-pay calculations or make Pinsent’s AI invent legislation in 2026.

The purpose of Jiten’s Jobs was never to drag unrelated institutional failures into a sack and hang them around one solicitor’s neck. That would be intellectually cheap and, worse, boring.

Instead, the series examined the institutions whose names help establish professional credibility. There is a difference, and that difference is where the real argument lives.

Prestigious employers operate as reputational manufacturers. Their names tell future employers that somebody has passed through serious systems, handled serious work and absorbed serious professional standards. That is why the names belong on the CV in the first place. Nobody lists Pinsent Masons or KPMG because they particularly enjoyed the office coffee.

If institutions contribute to professional credibility, examining those institutions is legitimate. Their successes help build the brand and their failures reveal the limits of that brand. What matters is how they behave when polished systems meet pressure, money and consequences.

Those are not accusations against every person in the building. They are questions about the factory producing the credential.

What A Prestigious Employer Actually Gives You

People leave jobs with more than experience. They leave with instincts, language, assumptions about hierarchy and ideas about what counts as risk. Over time, they learn which problems deserve escalation, which can be contained and which merely need a fresh label before being passed upstairs.

Corporate employment lawyers become particularly fluent in translation. A distressed employee becomes a grievance. Illness becomes capability. A broken relationship becomes risk. Discrimination becomes exposure. Redundancy becomes organisational change, while dismissal becomes process.

Those translations are necessary. Law cannot function entirely through emotion, and organisations cannot be operated through interpretative dance. Yet language changes how a problem is seen.

Spend enough time inside large organisations and almost every human disaster eventually acquires a project name, a spreadsheet and somebody beginning a sentence with “commercially”. Once that happens, the original person can start looking inconveniently small beside the process built around them.

That is professional formation. It is not conspiracy or indoctrination. Institutions teach through repetition, through what receives urgency, what gets rewarded, what disappears into procedure and what receives a holding email until next Tuesday.

Most of the important lessons never appear on the training slides because nobody needs to say them aloud.

The Corporate Lawyer’s Special Talent

Corporate employment law occupies a peculiar position because it deals with people while serving organisations. Those interests sometimes align beautifully. On other occasions, they emphatically do not.

A lawyer’s task is not simply to ask what happened. The job also requires questions about evidence, legal duties, liability, process and the safest achievable outcome for the client. That is ordinary professional work, not villainy.

The darker part lies in how efficiently a complicated human life can be translated into manageable corporate components. Illness becomes attendance, capability or adjustment. Conflict becomes conduct. Discrimination becomes exposure. Eventually dismissal, litigation and cost can arrive as the final boxes in a process chart.

An individual experiences a life going sideways while the organisation experiences a case file. That difference in perspective matters enormously when the lawyer eventually moves in-house.

And Then Came Cummins

Kotecha joined Cummins in 2018 and eventually became Senior Counsel, Labour & Employment Europe. The employment lawyer had completed the migration from external adviser to corporate interior.

Pinsent supplied the formal legal training. Olswang offered another glimpse of elite commercial practice. John Lewis briefly put him inside a major employer, while KPMG supplied five years inside one of the world’s largest professional-services machines. Cummins then became home.

That is where the professional geometry changes. An external employment lawyer receives problems from organisations, but an in-house employment lawyer exists inside the organisation producing them. Employer and client become the same beast.

Grievances are no longer bundles arriving from elsewhere. Sick employees are colleagues. Redundancies involve the workforce around you. Discrimination allegations travel through systems bearing your employer’s logo. The lawyer does not simply advise the machine from outside.

Instead, the lawyer becomes one of its components. That is why Kotecha’s professional route mattered to TCAP. The past does not prove what happened later, but it helps explain where the person sitting in that chair learned to operate.

The CV Is The Sanitised Version

Professional biographies are wonderfully clean things. There is no smell, no noise, no redundancy consultation happening three floors below and no payroll correction involving 69,000 people. Parliamentary committees do not appear beside job titles asking whether professional advisers became an expensive badge of legitimacy, while regulators remain politely off the page.

What survives are names, dates, titles, promotions and experience. A CV is not dishonest for excluding everything else because it simply has a different job. It is the sanitised version of professional life.

Jiten’s Jobs supplied the industrial tour. We walked through Pinsent while employment lawyers met employment reality, wandered through Olswang after BHS and phone hacking, entered John Lewis through the staff entrance and found partnership rhetoric colliding with payroll and hierarchy. KPMG gave us professional scepticism requiring regulatory excavation equipment.

Then the road reached Cummins.

The names on the CV never changed. Our understanding of them did.

The Logos Were Never The Point

This series could easily have become a gallery of corporate scandals. That would have been dull. Large organisations screw things up, and nobody needs TCAP to discover that revolutionary principle.

The more interesting pattern was the recurring contradiction between institutional authority and institutional fallibility. These organisations sell certainty, law, audit, governance, employment expertise, risk management and corporate responsibility. Clients pay enormous sums because professional systems are supposed to reduce chaos.

Often they do. On less glorious days, the experts end up standing ankle-deep in their own plumbing.

Pinsent could advise on employment law while restructuring employment lawyers. John Lewis could champion employee ownership while correcting millions in staff holiday pay. KPMG could sell professional scepticism while becoming embroiled in one of Britain’s defining audit disasters. Olswang could help organisations navigate crisis while becoming part of the professional machinery through which crisis itself was managed.

The common theme was never simply scandal. It was power wearing expertise as a uniform.

That matters because expertise carries authority. A prestigious adviser does not merely know things. Its presence can make decisions, transactions and organisations appear safer, more serious and more legitimate simply by standing beside them.

Sometimes that authority is deserved. Occasionally the uniform has gravy down the front.

What The CV Doesn’t Tell You

A CV tells you where somebody worked. It cannot tell you what those places taught without ever putting it in a training manual. Nor does it show how organisations behave when money, reputation and people begin pulling in different directions.

Professional reflexes accumulate quietly. Years spent inside serious institutions leave habits, language, assumptions and methods behind. Most importantly, a biography cannot tell you what somebody eventually carries forward.

That was the question beneath Jiten’s Jobs from the beginning. Not simply, “What did Jiten Kotecha do at every employer?” but “What sort of professional world produced the lawyer who eventually became Cummins’ Senior Counsel, Labour & Employment Europe?”

The answer did not sit inside one scandal. It spread across years of institutional weather: employment lawyers being restructured, professional advisers lending credibility to precarious transactions, a Partnership discovering tens of thousands of Partners needed pay corrections, an audit giant collecting millions while Carillion marched towards oblivion and lawyers developing procedures after corporate wrongdoing while managing the resulting liability.

None of those events belongs personally to Kotecha. They tell us something about the environments corporate professionals inhabit.

Environments matter because nobody spends years inside institutions without absorbing something from them. Fish do not write water on their CVs either.

End Of The Line

Jiten’s Jobs started as a look backwards and became a study of corporate education. Pinsent Masons taught the law. Olswang showed the market value of institutional prestige. John Lewis demonstrated how attractive corporate philosophy can collide with ugly arithmetic. KPMG showed how professional authority can survive for years beside catastrophic failure. Then Cummins inherited the finished lawyer.

That does not establish guilt. It establishes a journey, and journeys matter because professionals do not arrive in senior positions freshly manufactured on appointment day. They arrive carrying thousands of decisions, observations, habits and assumptions accumulated across years of work.

Some lessons appear on certificates. The important ones usually do not.

A CV can give you dates, job titles and prestigious logos lined up like medals across a uniform. What it cannot show is the weather inside those buildings, the compromises underneath the carpet, the expensive mistakes in the accounts, the staff leaving through side doors or the occasions when supposedly formidable institutions managed to make a spectacular arse of the very subjects on which they sold expertise.

That was why TCAP followed the route. Not to pin every institutional calamity onto one man, but to understand the professional world that produced him.

The prestigious logo was always the easy part. The interesting stuff began once we walked through the bastard door.

And that is where Jiten’s Jobs ends: not with one smoking gun, but with something considerably more useful.

A map of the factory that made the professional.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Jiten’s Jobs Finale : What The CV Doesn’t Tell You