From Passion to Purpose: The Story of OceanJuris

At the heart of OceanJuris lies the story of two individuals driven by a singular passion — the subsea cable industry. What started as long conversations about the laws, policies, and quiet engineering miracles that hold the world's internet together slowly turned into something more deliberate: a consultancy built around the questions we kept coming back to.

A different kind of infrastructure

Most people will never see a submarine cable. They are buried beneath the seabed, laid across canyons and continental shelves, and protected by a patchwork of international conventions, national laws, and long-standing industry practice. And yet more than 99% of intercontinental data traffic moves through them. They are the most important infrastructure almost nobody talks about.

For Anjali, the fascination began over a decade ago, when she first started researching the legal frameworks governing the seabed. From the Rhodes Academy summer school on the law of the sea, to her LLM at the National University of Singapore, to her internship at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg, the through-line was always the same: how do we regulate something that touches almost every jurisdiction on Earth but lives in places most legal systems were never designed to govern?

For me, the path was less linear. My background sits at the intersection of operations, project delivery, and digital service design — work I'd been doing across government and the public sector. But the more time I spent around this industry, the more I noticed that the operational side of permitting and compliance was just as fragmented as the legal side. Brilliant lawyers were producing brilliant analysis, and then it would land on a project team that had neither the time nor the structure to act on it well.

Why a consultancy

OceanJuris started with a simple observation: subsea cable projects don't fail because the law is unclear. They stall because the right advice isn't reaching the right people at the right moment in a project's lifecycle. Permits get delayed not for legal reasons but because no one mapped the dependencies between agencies. Risk assessments sit in folders because they were written for lawyers instead of for project managers.

We wanted to build something that closed that gap — not just legal advisory but advisory that fits the operational rhythm of how subsea projects actually run. Regulatory analysis you can hand to an environmental consultant. Permitting support that names the bottleneck before it becomes one. Risk frameworks project teams can act on without translating them first.

What we're building

OceanJuris is small by design. Anjali leads on regulation and policy, drawing on her work as a Principal Investigator on the Sustainable Subsea Networks project, her writing for Stanford's Aegis Paper Series, and a decade of practice across jurisdictions from India to Singapore to the Arctic. I lead on operations, keeping the work practical, the cadence steady, and the experience of working with us as straightforward as we can make it.

We didn't set out to build a large firm. We set out to build the consultancy we wished existed when we were on the other side of the table — one that knows the law deeply but treats every engagement as an operational problem first.

The subsea sector is in a moment of real change: more capacity, more scrutiny, more attention to environmental and security questions that didn't exist when the first cables were laid. We're glad to be doing this work now, and we're glad to be doing it together.

— Jeffrey