Two Singhania & Co senior associates, Meenakshi Acharya and Ashish Satpute and shipping company legal consultant Ravindra Avhad, have started up Mumbai full service firm RMA Legal last month.

Acharya told Legally India that “good contacts” to help bring them clients was what gave the three partners the confidence to start up. “I met Ashish when I was with Singhania. We already had a few clients and contacts so we thought of starting up. Ravindra already had an office at Bandra and was doing shipping and maritime on a consultant basis so he also suggested doing our own thing. The idea clicked and we thought let’s start something so we got our contacts together,” she said.

The firm currently has matters in the Economic Offences Wing, civil and criminal litigation, the setting up a company in India for a foreign IT sector client and pro bono matters.

Satpute who heads criminal litigation, intellectual property and cyber crime work at the firm worked under Pune and Jalgaon criminal litigation advocates in 2011 before joining Singhania & Co as an intern in April 2012 and being promoted to senior associate at the firm in September 2012.

He obtained his LLB from SS Maniyar Law College Jalgaon in 2011, his LLM from North Maharashtra University in 2013 and his MS in cyber law and cyber security from NLU Jodhpur in 2014. He is also a certified cyber crime investigator and a digital evidence analyst, said Acharya.

Acharya handles general corporate advisory work at the firm. The KC Law College 2008 alum began her career as a paralegal at AZB & Partners in 2007 until 2009 when she was made an associate at the firm. She left AZB in 2009 to join ARA Law as an associate before joining Singhania in May 2014.

Civil and criminal litigation and shipping and maritime head Avhad worked at various Mumbai litigation firms and independently in the Bombay high court from April 2010 and was a legal consultant to Seastar Ship Management since May 2014. He graduated from GLC Mumbai in 2010 and did his LLM in 2011 from the University of Southampton.

The firm operates mainly from Mittal Chambers in Mumbai’s Nariman Point but also has offices in Bandra, Delhi, Bangalore, Pune through alliances with litigation offices in those cities, and in London where it has an alliance with an independent UK litigator Jessica Dodds.

The Mittal Chambers office has space for around 10 people. The firm currently has three interns and is planning to hire up to three associates in the next half year.