This week's email newsletter is all about friendship and we ask, can someone be your best friend if you are embarrassed to be seen together?
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Can someone be your best friend if you are embarrassed to be seen together?
Phoenix and international firm Lovells continue refusing to publicly commit but they are happy to say that they like each other very much. Although they like others very much too.
And who can blame them, really - there are many risks for a fledgling Indian firm to be seen putting all its eggs into just one basket.
Luthra & Luthra partners last week have decided to treat their young friends more nicely and agreed to open up their equity on a lockstep model.
On the other hand, law graduate relations have been frosty this week as two rival national magazines published their annual law school rankings. Both league tables were topped by the institution whose vice-chancellor wants Harvard to become known as the Bangalore of the West. But the spats got ugly further down. Particularly NUJS Kolkata alumni voiced displeasure about their relegation to eighth place by one of the magazines.
Others just gloated and some readers called for annulment of the results, with one adding: "God protect those who rely on these rankings."
One other place unlikely to find much love lost this week was the Ambani family home, as younger brother Anil won the latest multi-million dollar High Court case, backed by Mulla & Mulla. But according to the Economic Times this morning, Mukesh's company directors want the brothers to just shake hands and make friends because "the costs of fighting protracted legal battles are too high".
But with family like these, who wouldn't need lawyers?
------ Monsoon still seems a way off in Mumbai but despite suffering under the heat lawyers have been busy: Wadia Ghandy will open an office in Chennai, Desai & Diwanji poaches four Crawford Bayley lawyers (very amicably), Thakker & Thakker promotes its first female partner and Rio Tinto prefers Indian lawyers.