Trilegal has opened an office in Gurgaon, and is relocating corporate practice partners Ravindra Bandhakavi, Harsh Pais, Yogesh Singh and Vaibhav Kothari there from its Delhi office.

According to the firm’s press release, “opening an office in Gurgaon will allow the firm to get closer to its clients and address an important market”.

Other large firms with a Gurgaon office include AZB & Partners, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas and J Sagar Associates (JSA), which all also have offices in New Delhi (or in Noida, in the case of AZB).

JSA is the only one of these that has a larger office in Gurgaon than in Delhi.

Update: Co-managing partner Karan Singh said that once all the teams had moved, the Gurgaon office in a DLF comple would house around 20 lawyers, with 70 lawyers remaining in Trilegal’s Delhi office, but the maximum capacity in the current Gurgaon space was around 45 lawyers.

“We’ll see after that,” he added. “Over a period of two to three years there’ll be much greater demand in Gurgaon, but any excess demand can always be met from Delhi in any case.”

All the four partners moving to the Gurgaon were corporate partners because “that’s the predominant client base in Gurgaon”, said Singh.

And while three out of the four partners also live in Gurgaon, the move was “very much driven by opportunity and demand”, rather than a lifestyle choice of partners who anyway lived in the conurbation.

While partners having a shorter commute was “always a happy outcome”, Singh said, “it obviously wouldn’t drive our decision” to open a new office. “It’d be a pretty intensive way of doing what is not a capital extensive business,” he joked. “Opening a new office is an expensive proposition in any case.

“There will be partners moving to the Gurgaon office even though they don’t live in Gurgaon.”

However, Singh stressed that while Gurgaon and Delhi partners would work closely together between the two offices, Gurgaon was intended as a standalone new location and it was not a move away from Delhi. "It’s meant to be a fifth office serving a new demand,” he said.

Photo by Jay