Law firms

Khaitan & Co Delhi principal associate Arjun Rajgopal joined K Law in Bangalore as corporate partner last month.

Indian lawyers practising abroad would end up bearing the brunt of the Bar Council of India (BCI) potential regulation of foreign law firms under the current regulatory regime, argued London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA) counsel Dushyant Dave before the Supreme Court yesterday.

Trilegal Delhi corporate, M&A and private equity counsel Vishwanath Pratap Singh has left the firm several weeks ago and is understood to be joining Luthra & Luthra as a partner in Delhi.

The Supreme Court refused to entertain adjournment pleas by senior advocates in today's hearing of the Bar Council of India (BCI) writ against the entry of foreign law firms into India, reported Bar & Bench.

Slaughter and May has topped the mergermarket value league table of international law firms that advised on M&A deals in the 2017 calendar year.

Itochu Petroleum Co, the Singapore-based subsidiary of Japanese trading company Itochu Corporation has announced the acquisition of 19.7% stake in Aegis Logistics' wholly-owned subsidiary, Hindustan Aegis LPG (HALPG), for INR 239 crores (apporximately $37.8m), as reported by Business Standard and VC Circle in May of last year. In addition to India, Itochu Corporation, the Japanese multinational trading group specialising in oil & gas, metals and other commodities, operates LPG import hubs in Japan and the Philippines.

Senior advocate Harish Salve helped the Delhi high court approve, but not yet notify, a set of new rules which would enable it to impose a staggering and unprecedented amount of costs on litigants filing frivolous cases before it, encourage video-conferencing trials and reduce litigation time in other ways.

AZB & Partners and Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas (SAM) acted on the biggest and greatest number of deals respectively, according to mergermarket (MM), which captured far fewer deals than both Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters databases that we had reported last week, in part due to its different deal eligibility criteria (see below).

The death penalty would stay on Indian statute books for at least another 50 years, predicted a former Chief Justice of India (CJI) in a wide-ranging study of opinions of former apex court judges conducted by NLU Delhi on the death penalty in India.

AZB & Partners was the busiest and fastest growing law firm in India this year according to year-end rankings released separately by Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters.

Former HSA Advocates partners Sakya Chaudhuri, Avijeet Lala and Anand Shrivastava’s Delhi start-up Neeti Niyaman has expanded to Mumbai with the opening of a new office in Fort.

MDP & Partners now again has a corporate practice and a projects / banking practice respectively with the addition of two new partners after rehiring former associate Pranav N Jain and former associate Malav Virani.