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Naik Naik adds Wadia Ghandy's Paranjpe as name partner, targets more senior hires and cities

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Media industry focussed firm Naik Naik & Co has hired two new partners from Wadia Ghandy & Co: partner Ashok Paranjpe joins as an equity and name partner while senior associate Leena Desai-Padhye came on board as a salaried partner.

Paranjpe specialises in real estate, banking and finance and disputes work and joined Naik & Naik on 1 May, resulting in a rebranding of the firm to become Naik Paranjpe & Company. He is a solicitor of the Bombay Incorporated Law Society and had been with Wadia Ghandy for almost 26 years and a partner for more than 20 years.

Former Wadia Ghandy senior associate Desai-Padhye will join Naik Paranjpe & Company as a non-equity partner in the corporate practice. She had been at Wadia Ghandy for around seven years and is a dual qualified Indian advocate and England & Wales solicitor.

Ameet Naik, the founding partner of Naik Naik & Co as it was then known, had also started his career at Wadia Ghandy.

"Ameet and I knew each other and we are at comfort levels with each other and we thought why not try setting up something new and taking it further," commented Paranjpe.

Naik said: "We obviously wanted to grow in the areas of real estate, banking and finance and Ashok comes in with a lot of experience on the transactional side and tremendous experience on the dispute resolution side."

The firm had also added around another seven lateral lawyer hires this month, added Naik, and already offered something approaching a full-service although it has focused on representing companies in the media sectors, such as Fame India, Reliance Mediaworks, Warner Brothers, BBC Worldwide and Viacom.

"The vision of the firm is really to be a full service firm – we are very solid on dispute resolution, IP and transactional work but we will be having basis in other cities – and the idea is to expand to second-tier cities, like Hyderabad and Chennai, and Delhi," he explained.

"We are already in discussions and we will go out and recruit more and more partners from bigger practices and from smaller practices as well."

Naik & Naik was founded by Ameet Naik less than seven years ago and has a total of 20 lawyers and five partners, of whom Naik and Paranjpe are currently the only equity partners. The other salary partners in addition to Desai-Padhye are Anuja Jhunjhunwala in real estate and retail and Madhu Gadodia in media, entertainment and intellectual property.

One Wadia Ghandy partner said the firm wished Paranjpe and Desai Padhye all the best in their careers.

Wadia Ghandy promoted three new partners in March.

Photo by: Looking Glass

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