ANM Global, which had been set up in 2009 by Nidish Mehrotra and Anuj Gupta, has hired Citi vice president Binay Kumar Mishra as a senior partner to head the firm’s banking and finance practice from Mumbai.

Mishra, who had been doing dispute resolution in ICICI Bank’s legal team from 2007 until 2012, before joining Citibank, will start at ANM on 16 January as its ninth partner.

Mehrotra said that he had known the 2004-Symbiosis Law School Pune graduate since his college days, and would be focusing primarily on banking and finance litigation, with an initial focus on Mumbai and Delhi.

ANM, which had briefly joined hands with Rodney Ryder in 2010 for around a year, will have three partners each in Mumbai and Delhi, and one each in Bangalore, Chandigarh and Kanpur, now numbers 32 fee-earners (including partners), said Mehrotra.

While the offices are the firm’s rather than mere associations with local lawyers, explained Mehrotra, the partnership was a salaried partnership other than co-founders Gupta and himself.

Mehrotra added that ANM had at the beginning of this year also set up its fifth office for its media and entertainment practice group vertical, which he was heading. The new office in Mumbai’s Andheri West district, in the Crystal Plaza building, would hopefully enable the firm to corner more work in the sector.

He said: “We already had clients in entertainment and media space in the last four years, but we never expanded it. Now I felt there’s a need to expand, and that’s why I decided to take this office space,” he said, and quipped: “I love Bollywood no.”

The biggest client working with the firm in the sector on contracts, IP and litigation work had been Balaji Telefilms, he explained, as well as work for content production company Contiole, and working with the Indian Film and TV Producers Council in representations to the government and before courts.

ANM’s new vertical’s major targets going forward would be production houses and broadcasters, though he joked he’d also be happy to work with large celebrity clients such as Boman Irani and, if he was “very very lucky maybe”, Shah Rukh Khan.

On the broadcaster side, particularly, even though none of them were currently ANM’s clients, Mehrotra said that he hoped that he would ultimately bag four big broadcasters: Colour, Sony, Star and NDTV.

While he acknowledged that all had legal representation already, he quipped: “Balaji also had lawyers, but we entered, no?”