Platinum Partners Mumbai office has hired a senior lawyer from White & Case in Singapore to bulk up its second layer of corporate fee-earners in the young office.

White & Case associate Yashasvi Mohanram has joined Platinum as the Mumbai office's second senior associate on Monday (2 August), having worked at the US firm's Singapore office for a little more than a year. Until 2008 he had been at Platinum's Delhi pre-cursor firm Daulet-Singh & Associates.

Mohanram graduated from NLSIU Bangalore in 2001 and completed an MBA at Indian School of Business Hyderabad. He said: "Both for personal and professional reasons it made sense to come back now and Platinum was the first choice."

Platinum's Mumbai head Nihar Mody commented: "We're honestly absolutely delighted from the perspective of getting someone with exposure with White & Case and who is academically one of the toppers.

"Effectively that gives us three M&A partners in Bombay and two in Delhi and with our focus on being a boutique M&A firm that is something we are very, very happy with."

"We don't really have designations here as such, he'll be effectively be working as an of counsel or senior associate," he explained. "It really doesn't matter - we are a pretty flat firm."

The Mumbai office now consists of 11 lawyers, including two senior associates and two partners following the hiring of Thakker & Thakker partner Gautam Bhat in December 2009.

The Mumbai office has also now hired its own full-time knowledge management lawyer, who completed the Bombay solicitor's qualification and an LLM at NYU, said Mody.