V Law Partners has merged with DH Law Associates to form a 10 partner, 50 lawyer firm.
The firm started up by former ALMT Legal partner Vivek Daswaney in 2009, merged with the four-city firm DH Law, which is headed by managing partner Nusrat Hassan, on 1 January.
Daswaney said in an email announcement: “It’s been a great journey and experience to set up and run a law firm. Work has grown, clients have grown, markets are growing and so the time has come for us to grow! I have personally known most of the partners for over a decade and the synergies seem right for us to integrate our practices to provide a better and broader platform to our present and prospective clients.”
Daswaney will now be based in the Mumbai office of the merged firm as a senior equity partner.
He told Legally India that one of the reasons to merge was that scaling up beyond 10 lawyers had been tough, though work and profits had been good. “I was on a crossroads to take a call whether i want to remain a 10-lawyer law firm. or whether I push myself a little more and take it to the next level. If I tried to grow V law, 10 years later I would be a DH Law.”
Clients that he said he had helped set up, such as What’s On India Media, which was now part of the world’s largest metadata company, had become too large to be handled by a boutique M&A and real estate firm. “My clients were outgrowing me,” he said.
“IPR and litigation I kept outsourcing,” he explained, “but beyond a point even a client is uncomfortable with outsourcing. The pressure is from within.”
At DH Law, which was “very strong in disputes work” but had been trying to find a corporate and real estate partner for a long time, according to Daswaney, the synergy was therefore natural.
After taking on two other partners in 2010 in a short-lived expansion, Daswaney bought his own office space last year in Mumbai’s Nariman point area. He and his team are currently migrating to DH Law’s Nariman Point office, in Free Press House.
“The last 15 days I’ve just been too busy with delivering what there was in V Law and likewise for them - real estate and all that [work] - has just fallen into my plate,” he mused about his transition.
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