Vaish Associates announced no new partners in its annual promotions this year-end, but made up five new principal associates and eight new senior associates across all offices except Bangalore. Eight of the thirteen promotions effective yesterday are in Delhi.

The Mumbai corporate team’s Krishna Kishore (ILS Pune in 2006), Tushar Shah (GLC Mumbai in 2006) and Amitjivan Joshi (GLC Mumbai in 2006), the Gurgaon corporate team’s Akshay Saxena (Delhi University 2005), and Shashank Shekhar (Delhi University 2003) from Delhi’s indirect tax practice were promoted to principal associate level.

Kishore joined the firm in 2006, Joshi and Shah in 2007, and Shekhar and Saxena in 2009. Shekhar was a lateral hire in 2009 from Lakshmikumaran and Sridharan.

Vaish has a total of 19 principal associates across all offices; former principal associate Gautam Chopra left the firm to join Seth Dua Associates in March.

There is no designation between that of principal associate and partner at the firm. The firm’s partnership is currently 13-strong. It did not promote any principal associates to partner level last year as well.

Associates promoted to the senior associate level were Shaily Gupta, Deepashree Rao, Abhishek Agarwal and Upvan Gupta from Delhi’s direct tax team, Kapil Minocha from Delhi’s corporate team, Pratyush Khurana and P Sandhya handling corporate and banking and finance transactions in Gurgaon and Mumbai, respectively, and Vaibhav Choukse in Delhi’s competition practice.

Sandhya joined Vaish in 2008, Agarwal, Choukse, and Khurana in 2010, Shaily Gupta and Manocha in 2011, while Upvan Gupta and Rao joined last year.

While Shaily Gupta and Upvan Gupta were both at Ernst & Young before joining Vaish, Deepashree Rao was with KPMG, Agarwal with BDO Consulting, Minocha with BMR Advisors, Khurana with Axis Bank and Choukse with Amarchand Mangaldas. Sandhya joined the firm straight from law school.

Vaish Mumbai senior partner Bomi Daruwala said in a firm statement that the promotions recognised the contributions of the firm’s attorneys, which were its most important asset.

Photo by Mzelle biscotte