ET BureauVaishali Sharma faced up to her moment of reckoning earlier this year. Her 14-year career with law firms including AZB Partners and Khaitan & Co had brought her to a point where progression within the firm could no longer keep pace with her personal ambition. She had joined AZB in 2005 working with three smaller firms and was made partner mid-way through her five-year stint, while on secondment to a London-based law firm.
She took the plunge, started her own firm, which she intends to develop to some maturity, before plying into or partnering with likeminded law firms or proprietorships. That is the genesis of Agram Legal Consultants. She has with her today three associates, two who were on her team at Khaitan just before this, and one who has held on with her in every move for the last nine years.
At least 20 different variations of Sharma’s story have played out in the legal profession over the past couple of years. At least that many lawyers have quit established firms to venture out on their own. Large and successful firms are fast turning into spawning grounds for new break-away legal start-ups.
"The break-aways will continue and reach equilibrium only when foreign law firms are allowed in India," says Bharat Vasani, general counsel Tata group.
Such large numbers of breakaway lawyerentrepreneurs are an intriguing phenomenon.
"Law is a profession, not a business," points out Nishith Desai, founder of Nishith Desai Associates. It is highly dependent on individuals and intellectual capital. Over time, lawyers come to be known by the work they do; they are not eclipsed by the brands they represent.
"In India, clients tend to stick to individuals more than they do in western firms. So after a few years of working with promoters, especially of mid-sized firms, lawyers can be sure to get some work (when they strike out on their own)," says Ravi Kulkarni, a partner at Khaitan & Co and lawyer for 40 years. "Yet, within law firms, the gap between the founders and partners remains huge." As a result, scope of growth for the other partners pales in comparison with the founding members.
The combination of these two factors – outside recognition of their individual work and some glass ceilings in large firms – is prompting the younger generation to break-away and start their own firms.
Legal work is also growing significantly in volumes, ensuring that survival of new firms is not too much of a challenge. The top 10 law firms handled M&A transactions worth $40 billion during the quarter to September, according to data from a Mergermarket report.
Typically, 2-3 per cent of this would go as fees to law firms. And, this is just M&A business.
Companies use law firms for a bunch of other services too. Industry sources estimate that big firms have been growing at 20 per cent annually even during recent years of poor economic growth. All this makes the industry fertile ground for entrepreneurship.
The urge to break away
The growing number of break-away firms seems to suggest that there is at least some discontent simmering within large firms. To become equity partners in a firm, associates being offered partnership have to buy their share. This practice is often an entry barrier. This was the reason Jyoti Sagar founded his own firm 23 years ago.
Having worked at Remfry & Sagar for 16 years, he found it unreasonable to pay in order to be included in partnership.
This is still one reason why many lawyers are breaking away. Only, such break-aways are happening at a faster pace now.
The 66-year-old lawyer is a rare exception. Last year, Sagar retired, ceding all his equity to the existing partners. He did this to ensure that Jyoti Sagar Associates was not a family run firm and had no glass ceiling or even a perception of one.
"The occurrence of such break-aways in the profession is cyclical, but by no means is success guaranteed," says Jyoti Sagar. Sure, there is plenty of business to be had in the beginning, but it is not as easy to grow.
"How can an individual serve McDonald or IBM. You need teams of people with growth and globalization," says Prabhat K Mehta, partner at Sidley Austin, one of the US’s top law firms.
Many American law firms have grown with clients over four decades. In the UK for example, large law firms like Linklaters or Herbert Smith Freehills have several hundred partners and none have a controlling stake. These firms tend to act more like teams where the person generating the work may not be doing it at all.
In India, the newer firms win most of their clients with niche work — technology, intellectual property, competition law etc; rarely do they grab full-service contracts. Moreover, big companies are also setting up large in house teams to handle regular day-to-day legal work, limiting how much business flows out. Says Sagar: "There are teams of 50, 60, sometimes 100 lawyers within large corporates today. They only look out when it is a large transaction or for a deep specialisation."
When Vasani joined the Tata Group, 90 per cent of legal work was redirected to law firms. Now, the group has nearly 460 lawyers and much of its work is done in house.
Growing beyond a point is a challenge for the newer firms. "It takes three or four years for reality to hit home; that the brand of a firm has a bigger impact than expected," says Ritvik Lukose, chief executive, Vahura a legal search and consulting firm.
Reason to risk it
The emergence of the corporate lawyer itself is a phenomenon of the last decade. Before that, in the early nineties, when the first few batches of National Law School joined work, everyone did all the work, the bulk of which was litigation.
"That generation of corporate lawyers has now come of age and is ready to risk a new venture," says Suhaan Mukerji, partner at PLR Chambers. Mukerji has started a law firm targeting clients for public policy. Winning new business, he says, was second nature even during his earlier stint with Amarchand & Mangaldas & Suresh Shroff. His role there also entailed working as a "commando unit" and generating business and servicing clients.
Getting sufficient business to keep afloat is hardly a problem, say the young lawyer entrepreneurs. Reaching the Rs 2-crore mark is the low hanging fruit that lawyers invariably bring with them as they leave their older firms. Nishith Desai says his firm routinely passes up high volume work because he’d prefer to keep the team lean and margins high. Invariably this work would get lapped up by the smaller firms.
Specialisation also helps. Sammuel Mani, formerly chief legal officer of Infosys, started MCM Law because he saw there were no specialists in the technology field. His firm’s revenue is a short of Rs 5 crore and his operating expense is about 60 per cent of the fees.
Still, not everyone is successful. PVX Partners that was folded into Khaitan & Co earlier this year is a case in point. Rohit Das left AMSS to found the firm and he was joined by Mohit Abraham, also from AMSS, and GT Thomas Phillippe from AZB. Deepto Roy (also from AMSS) joined later. Soon differences on growth path, client selection and nature of work emerged. Das was the first to leave the firm to set up his individual practice. "Survival was never an issue. The problem was what next," recalls Roy.
When the two meet…
Large firms and the newer break-aways are learning to co-exist in the same ecosystem. "I guess you have to let go gracefully at some point," says Bahram Vakil, one of the three founding partners of AZB. Its chief executive Abhijit Joshi recently resigned with intent to start his own firm.
Another AZB partner who quite earlier says there is no acrimony; but there is not much support either. "After I quit, in standard Amarchand style, I ceased to exist," he says.
On the face of it, large firms and their breakaways maintain cordial terms. The new law firms pledge allegiance to their parents. AZB regularly refers work back to firms that spawned from it. "It is better to have a good working relation with alumni than to fret and fume over their leaving," he says. The newer firms are able to offer lower pricing and personal attention to clients.
The former AZB chief executive seconds that. "I am leaving AZB on good terms and hope to keep it that way."
A Lawyer Entrepreneur Finds his Niche
Suhaan Mukerji
Start-up: PLR Chambers
Former Employer: Amarchand Mangaldas
Suhaan Mukerji quit Amarchand Mangaldas a little over a year ago after an eight-year stint, which included setting up the top law firm’s government practice. Then he spent a short while in a government advisory on the role of technology in the justice system before setting up PLR Chambers, a boutique legal advisory firm specialising in policy and regulation and working primarily in government affairs.
Opening his own venture was natural for Mukerji who believes every lawyer is an entrepreneur of sorts. "Even in a firm you work in commando units, and are responsible for generating work and delivering on it," he said.
His deep interest and specialisation in public policy too helped Mukerji launch PLR where the three initials stand for policy, law and regulation. "If you are a specialist in an area where everyone doesn’t have the skill then it’s easier to break out on your own," he said.
PLR Chambers has worked with the roads ministry on road safety laws and with IT body DEITY on cloud computing norms, besides a number of private companies.
It operates out of Mumbai and Delhi and has six lawyers in government affairs and two in litigation. At present it has annual revenues of less than Rs 5 crore.
Mukerji said he wanted to form an ownership neutral platform, where the firm’s founder would not be an overpowering influence. "There was a charm in institution building; seeing if you can create a personality agnostic institution." That’s his goal although at the moment he is the only partner in the firm.
A Take-off from MIAL
Ramesh Vaidyanathan
Start-Up: Advaya Legal
Former Employer: Mumbai International Airport
Ramesh Vaidyanathan quit a top-dollar job as general counsel of the Mumbai International Airport to form Advaya Legal in 2010, a little ahead of the recent boom in emerging law firms.
Advaya is a full service firm with a solution-focused approach and has three partners, including one who joined just a few months ago.
Vaidyanathan says he is inspired by the transformation of law firms’ operating philosophy, citing the example of Jyoti Sagar of JSA who retired voluntarily last year. "Promoters are less confident of being able to ‘manage’ situations that arise, and are therefore assigning greater importance to legal ground work," he said.
Given Vaidyanathan’s background, most of his clients tend to be from the infrastructure sector.
Advaya, with annual revenues of a little over Rs 5 crore, is working on many cross-border investment transactions in the infrastructure space that are subject to a plethora of regulatory changes.
An Alliance That Didn’t Last
Vishnu Jerome, Priyanka Roy, Ravi Kumar
Former Start-Up: Alliance Legal
Alliance Legal, a law firm started by three law school batch mates with experience in different companies, lasted only a year. The three — Vishnu Jerome, Priyanka Roy and Ravi Kumar — eventually went different ways. The experiment failed not because they couldn’t get enough business, but because they couldn’t always agree on what business to chase.
"Commercially it was working, but there may have been differences in longterm vision between us," Jerome said.
In 2011, Jerome planned to quit AZB Partners with colleague Abhijit Joshi to start a new venture. But Joshi backtracked, accepting the role of chief executive of all AZB offices excluding Delhi. But Jerome went ahead and joined hands with his old batch mates Kumar and Roy to form Alliance Legal.
But soon they realised it was not going the way they wanted. Roy, who had worked at ICICI Bank, Amarchand Mangaldas and J Sagar Associates, said, "When you start out with the idea of how to do business it all seems to match, but as you go along you find there are different ways to do it."
Jerome — who at the start of his career had spent a year working with Poovayya and Company — started P&C Legal in Mumbai, in January 2013. He said P&C Legal, Mumbai runs independent of Poovayya & Co, with revenues in the range of Rs 6-7 crore. Kumar joined Amarchand Mangaldas in Mumbai.
Roy, who retains the rights for Alliance Legal brand, joined former colleague from ICICI Bank Pramod Rao at IndusLaw. Soon, Rao left for Citibank.
From Making to Doing Law
Sandeep Parekh
Start-Up: Finsec Law Advisors
Former Employer: Sebi, IIM-A
An internship with Harish Salve, stints at law firms overseas and in India, a lead legal role at the Securities and Exchange Board of India and a teaching stint at IIM Ahmedabad — Sandeep Parekh has had all that before opening his own law firm, Finsec Law Advisors.
Parekh started looking for options after his two years as executive director at markets regulator Sebi in 2008. He had about 100 lawyers working under him and the job gave him an opportunity to script regulations. "The vast bulk of securities laws administered by Sebi are in fact drafted by Sebi itself. The legal department has a significant role to play in the drafting of the delegated legislation," he said. But there weren’t many options. "Too many had one kind of a glass ceiling or another, whether in the form of family domination at the top or otherwise," he said.
So Parekh took up a teaching job at IIM Ahmedabad for a couple of years before starting out on his own. "I have never hesitated in getting people better and smarter than me at the firm," Parekh said. "I commonly joke that I am the only person not from one of the top three national law schools in our firm." Finsec Law Advisors has 10 lawyers including two partners, and earns a little short of Rs 5 crore a year.
A Tech Law Master From Infy
Samuel Mani
Start-Up: MCM (with Utham Chengappa & Neil Mathur)
Former Employer: Infosys
Samuel Mani, Utham Chengappa and Neil Mathur left Infosys as the IT firm’s three senior-most lawyers in 2012, after nearly a decade of service, to for MCM Law, a technology focused law firm.
Mani, who was general counsel of Infosys, said his options were to either play a typecast role for the rest of his working life or to venture out. "I became head legal at Infosys at the age of 33. By 37, I was questioning, ‘What next?’" he said.
However, unlike lawyers leaving law firms, Mani and his partners had no captive clients. "Initially it was quite hard to get business," said Mani.
It was the brand stamp of Infosys that helped open doors. During their tenure, Infosys’ revenues grew nearly 100-fold, and the team had significant local and international experience in deals that had been forged, clauses that were added over the years and typical pitfalls in contracts. More than anyone else they were aware of the need to forge tight outsourcing agreements, keeping in mind privacy and data protection, intellectual property commercialisation and licensing, and dispute resolution.
That is precisely what MCM — or, Mani Chengappa Mathur — does. It has annual revenues short of Rs 5 crore, and spends about 60 per cent of that on operations.
Moving Ahead of Consolidation
Vaishali Sharma
Start-Up: Agram Legal Consultants
Former Employers: AZB, Khaitan & Co
She needed to cool her head in 2010 when her friends and colleagues were starting out on their own.
Sharma, instead took a sabbatical to pursue trekking around the globe. By the time she returned a few months later, she felt she still had more to learn from law firms, and decided to join Khaitan & Co, knowing she would be leaving to start out on her own.
With an 8-month-old practice clocking close to an estimated annual billing of around Rs 2 crore, the firm hopes to breakeven with its four lawyers soon. Her executive assistant has stood by her in every move for nine years, facilitating the transition to staring her firm, she said.
"There are some clients who have stayed with me whether it was at AZB, Khaitan, or now here," Sharma said, adding that these clients continue to pay the same fees as long as the quality is assured. Her areas of work remain focussed on corporate and competition advisory that she headed at AZB.
At a later date, she will consider partnering with colleagues to grow scope and size of her firm. Meanwhile, she’d rather find her groove. "It is like baby steps, you’ll fall and learn to get up."
She took the plunge, started her own firm, which she intends to develop to some maturity, before plying into or partnering with likeminded law firms or proprietorships. That is the genesis of Agram Legal Consultants. She has with her today three associates, two who were on her team at Khaitan just before this, and one who has held on with her in every move for the last nine years.
At least 20 different variations of Sharma’s story have played out in the legal profession over the past couple of years. At least that many lawyers have quit established firms to venture out on their own. Large and successful firms are fast turning into spawning grounds for new break-away legal start-ups.
"The break-aways will continue and reach equilibrium only when foreign law firms are allowed in India," says Bharat Vasani, general counsel Tata group.
Such large numbers of breakaway lawyerentrepreneurs are an intriguing phenomenon.
"Law is a profession, not a business," points out Nishith Desai, founder of Nishith Desai Associates. It is highly dependent on individuals and intellectual capital. Over time, lawyers come to be known by the work they do; they are not eclipsed by the brands they represent.
"In India, clients tend to stick to individuals more than they do in western firms. So after a few years of working with promoters, especially of mid-sized firms, lawyers can be sure to get some work (when they strike out on their own)," says Ravi Kulkarni, a partner at Khaitan & Co and lawyer for 40 years. "Yet, within law firms, the gap between the founders and partners remains huge." As a result, scope of growth for the other partners pales in comparison with the founding members.
The combination of these two factors – outside recognition of their individual work and some glass ceilings in large firms – is prompting the younger generation to break-away and start their own firms.
Legal work is also growing significantly in volumes, ensuring that survival of new firms is not too much of a challenge. The top 10 law firms handled M&A transactions worth $40 billion during the quarter to September, according to data from a Mergermarket report.
Typically, 2-3 per cent of this would go as fees to law firms. And, this is just M&A business.
Companies use law firms for a bunch of other services too. Industry sources estimate that big firms have been growing at 20 per cent annually even during recent years of poor economic growth. All this makes the industry fertile ground for entrepreneurship.
The urge to break away
The growing number of break-away firms seems to suggest that there is at least some discontent simmering within large firms. To become equity partners in a firm, associates being offered partnership have to buy their share. This practice is often an entry barrier. This was the reason Jyoti Sagar founded his own firm 23 years ago.
Having worked at Remfry & Sagar for 16 years, he found it unreasonable to pay in order to be included in partnership.
This is still one reason why many lawyers are breaking away. Only, such break-aways are happening at a faster pace now.
The 66-year-old lawyer is a rare exception. Last year, Sagar retired, ceding all his equity to the existing partners. He did this to ensure that Jyoti Sagar Associates was not a family run firm and had no glass ceiling or even a perception of one.
"The occurrence of such break-aways in the profession is cyclical, but by no means is success guaranteed," says Jyoti Sagar. Sure, there is plenty of business to be had in the beginning, but it is not as easy to grow.
"How can an individual serve McDonald or IBM. You need teams of people with growth and globalization," says Prabhat K Mehta, partner at Sidley Austin, one of the US’s top law firms.
Many American law firms have grown with clients over four decades. In the UK for example, large law firms like Linklaters or Herbert Smith Freehills have several hundred partners and none have a controlling stake. These firms tend to act more like teams where the person generating the work may not be doing it at all.
In India, the newer firms win most of their clients with niche work — technology, intellectual property, competition law etc; rarely do they grab full-service contracts. Moreover, big companies are also setting up large in house teams to handle regular day-to-day legal work, limiting how much business flows out. Says Sagar: "There are teams of 50, 60, sometimes 100 lawyers within large corporates today. They only look out when it is a large transaction or for a deep specialisation."
When Vasani joined the Tata Group, 90 per cent of legal work was redirected to law firms. Now, the group has nearly 460 lawyers and much of its work is done in house.
Growing beyond a point is a challenge for the newer firms. "It takes three or four years for reality to hit home; that the brand of a firm has a bigger impact than expected," says Ritvik Lukose, chief executive, Vahura a legal search and consulting firm.
Reason to risk it
The emergence of the corporate lawyer itself is a phenomenon of the last decade. Before that, in the early nineties, when the first few batches of National Law School joined work, everyone did all the work, the bulk of which was litigation.
"That generation of corporate lawyers has now come of age and is ready to risk a new venture," says Suhaan Mukerji, partner at PLR Chambers. Mukerji has started a law firm targeting clients for public policy. Winning new business, he says, was second nature even during his earlier stint with Amarchand & Mangaldas & Suresh Shroff. His role there also entailed working as a "commando unit" and generating business and servicing clients.
Getting sufficient business to keep afloat is hardly a problem, say the young lawyer entrepreneurs. Reaching the Rs 2-crore mark is the low hanging fruit that lawyers invariably bring with them as they leave their older firms. Nishith Desai says his firm routinely passes up high volume work because he’d prefer to keep the team lean and margins high. Invariably this work would get lapped up by the smaller firms.
Specialisation also helps. Sammuel Mani, formerly chief legal officer of Infosys, started MCM Law because he saw there were no specialists in the technology field. His firm’s revenue is a short of Rs 5 crore and his operating expense is about 60 per cent of the fees.
Still, not everyone is successful. PVX Partners that was folded into Khaitan & Co earlier this year is a case in point. Rohit Das left AMSS to found the firm and he was joined by Mohit Abraham, also from AMSS, and GT Thomas Phillippe from AZB. Deepto Roy (also from AMSS) joined later. Soon differences on growth path, client selection and nature of work emerged. Das was the first to leave the firm to set up his individual practice. "Survival was never an issue. The problem was what next," recalls Roy.
When the two meet…
Large firms and the newer break-aways are learning to co-exist in the same ecosystem. "I guess you have to let go gracefully at some point," says Bahram Vakil, one of the three founding partners of AZB. Its chief executive Abhijit Joshi recently resigned with intent to start his own firm.
Another AZB partner who quite earlier says there is no acrimony; but there is not much support either. "After I quit, in standard Amarchand style, I ceased to exist," he says.
On the face of it, large firms and their breakaways maintain cordial terms. The new law firms pledge allegiance to their parents. AZB regularly refers work back to firms that spawned from it. "It is better to have a good working relation with alumni than to fret and fume over their leaving," he says. The newer firms are able to offer lower pricing and personal attention to clients.
The former AZB chief executive seconds that. "I am leaving AZB on good terms and hope to keep it that way."
A Lawyer Entrepreneur Finds his Niche
Suhaan Mukerji
Start-up: PLR Chambers
Former Employer: Amarchand Mangaldas
Suhaan Mukerji quit Amarchand Mangaldas a little over a year ago after an eight-year stint, which included setting up the top law firm’s government practice. Then he spent a short while in a government advisory on the role of technology in the justice system before setting up PLR Chambers, a boutique legal advisory firm specialising in policy and regulation and working primarily in government affairs.
Opening his own venture was natural for Mukerji who believes every lawyer is an entrepreneur of sorts. "Even in a firm you work in commando units, and are responsible for generating work and delivering on it," he said.
His deep interest and specialisation in public policy too helped Mukerji launch PLR where the three initials stand for policy, law and regulation. "If you are a specialist in an area where everyone doesn’t have the skill then it’s easier to break out on your own," he said.
PLR Chambers has worked with the roads ministry on road safety laws and with IT body DEITY on cloud computing norms, besides a number of private companies.
It operates out of Mumbai and Delhi and has six lawyers in government affairs and two in litigation. At present it has annual revenues of less than Rs 5 crore.
Mukerji said he wanted to form an ownership neutral platform, where the firm’s founder would not be an overpowering influence. "There was a charm in institution building; seeing if you can create a personality agnostic institution." That’s his goal although at the moment he is the only partner in the firm.
A Take-off from MIAL
Ramesh Vaidyanathan
Start-Up: Advaya Legal
Former Employer: Mumbai International Airport
Ramesh Vaidyanathan quit a top-dollar job as general counsel of the Mumbai International Airport to form Advaya Legal in 2010, a little ahead of the recent boom in emerging law firms.
Advaya is a full service firm with a solution-focused approach and has three partners, including one who joined just a few months ago.
Vaidyanathan says he is inspired by the transformation of law firms’ operating philosophy, citing the example of Jyoti Sagar of JSA who retired voluntarily last year. "Promoters are less confident of being able to ‘manage’ situations that arise, and are therefore assigning greater importance to legal ground work," he said.
Given Vaidyanathan’s background, most of his clients tend to be from the infrastructure sector.
Advaya, with annual revenues of a little over Rs 5 crore, is working on many cross-border investment transactions in the infrastructure space that are subject to a plethora of regulatory changes.
An Alliance That Didn’t Last
Vishnu Jerome, Priyanka Roy, Ravi Kumar
Former Start-Up: Alliance Legal
Alliance Legal, a law firm started by three law school batch mates with experience in different companies, lasted only a year. The three — Vishnu Jerome, Priyanka Roy and Ravi Kumar — eventually went different ways. The experiment failed not because they couldn’t get enough business, but because they couldn’t always agree on what business to chase.
"Commercially it was working, but there may have been differences in longterm vision between us," Jerome said.
In 2011, Jerome planned to quit AZB Partners with colleague Abhijit Joshi to start a new venture. But Joshi backtracked, accepting the role of chief executive of all AZB offices excluding Delhi. But Jerome went ahead and joined hands with his old batch mates Kumar and Roy to form Alliance Legal.
But soon they realised it was not going the way they wanted. Roy, who had worked at ICICI Bank, Amarchand Mangaldas and J Sagar Associates, said, "When you start out with the idea of how to do business it all seems to match, but as you go along you find there are different ways to do it."
Jerome — who at the start of his career had spent a year working with Poovayya and Company — started P&C Legal in Mumbai, in January 2013. He said P&C Legal, Mumbai runs independent of Poovayya & Co, with revenues in the range of Rs 6-7 crore. Kumar joined Amarchand Mangaldas in Mumbai.
Roy, who retains the rights for Alliance Legal brand, joined former colleague from ICICI Bank Pramod Rao at IndusLaw. Soon, Rao left for Citibank.
From Making to Doing Law
Sandeep Parekh
Start-Up: Finsec Law Advisors
Former Employer: Sebi, IIM-A
An internship with Harish Salve, stints at law firms overseas and in India, a lead legal role at the Securities and Exchange Board of India and a teaching stint at IIM Ahmedabad — Sandeep Parekh has had all that before opening his own law firm, Finsec Law Advisors.
Parekh started looking for options after his two years as executive director at markets regulator Sebi in 2008. He had about 100 lawyers working under him and the job gave him an opportunity to script regulations. "The vast bulk of securities laws administered by Sebi are in fact drafted by Sebi itself. The legal department has a significant role to play in the drafting of the delegated legislation," he said. But there weren’t many options. "Too many had one kind of a glass ceiling or another, whether in the form of family domination at the top or otherwise," he said.
So Parekh took up a teaching job at IIM Ahmedabad for a couple of years before starting out on his own. "I have never hesitated in getting people better and smarter than me at the firm," Parekh said. "I commonly joke that I am the only person not from one of the top three national law schools in our firm." Finsec Law Advisors has 10 lawyers including two partners, and earns a little short of Rs 5 crore a year.
A Tech Law Master From Infy
Samuel Mani
Start-Up: MCM (with Utham Chengappa & Neil Mathur)
Former Employer: Infosys
Samuel Mani, Utham Chengappa and Neil Mathur left Infosys as the IT firm’s three senior-most lawyers in 2012, after nearly a decade of service, to for MCM Law, a technology focused law firm.
Mani, who was general counsel of Infosys, said his options were to either play a typecast role for the rest of his working life or to venture out. "I became head legal at Infosys at the age of 33. By 37, I was questioning, ‘What next?’" he said.
However, unlike lawyers leaving law firms, Mani and his partners had no captive clients. "Initially it was quite hard to get business," said Mani.
It was the brand stamp of Infosys that helped open doors. During their tenure, Infosys’ revenues grew nearly 100-fold, and the team had significant local and international experience in deals that had been forged, clauses that were added over the years and typical pitfalls in contracts. More than anyone else they were aware of the need to forge tight outsourcing agreements, keeping in mind privacy and data protection, intellectual property commercialisation and licensing, and dispute resolution.
That is precisely what MCM — or, Mani Chengappa Mathur — does. It has annual revenues short of Rs 5 crore, and spends about 60 per cent of that on operations.
Moving Ahead of Consolidation
Vaishali Sharma
Start-Up: Agram Legal Consultants
Former Employers: AZB, Khaitan & Co
She needed to cool her head in 2010 when her friends and colleagues were starting out on their own.
Sharma, instead took a sabbatical to pursue trekking around the globe. By the time she returned a few months later, she felt she still had more to learn from law firms, and decided to join Khaitan & Co, knowing she would be leaving to start out on her own.
With an 8-month-old practice clocking close to an estimated annual billing of around Rs 2 crore, the firm hopes to breakeven with its four lawyers soon. Her executive assistant has stood by her in every move for nine years, facilitating the transition to staring her firm, she said.
"There are some clients who have stayed with me whether it was at AZB, Khaitan, or now here," Sharma said, adding that these clients continue to pay the same fees as long as the quality is assured. Her areas of work remain focussed on corporate and competition advisory that she headed at AZB.
At a later date, she will consider partnering with colleagues to grow scope and size of her firm. Meanwhile, she’d rather find her groove. "It is like baby steps, you’ll fall and learn to get up."
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