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Manan Lahoty left Induslaw with a 50+ cap marks team to Cyril Amarchand.
Nisha Kaur Uberoi left Trilegal with a 25+ competition team to JSA.
Both these teams are stellar, and highest billing practices. Nisha Kaur is said to bill Rs. 30 crore per year (highest in anti trust space) Manan is also runs a profitable ECM team.
For those who are insiders at Trilegal/Indus/JSA/CAM
1. What are the Financials of this move. How much more will Manan and Nisha Kaur make?
2. How did Indus loose Manan?
How can CAM pay more to Manan?
Trilegal for example lost Nisha because of cravath scale where high performers like Nisha doesn't get adequately remunerated.
3. How did Nisha Kaur Uberoi, Manan Lahoty build such profitable high performing teams? How do they manage personal life (family kids etc) with demanding practice.
Especially for Nisha Kaur Uberoi, being a women it's more hard ▮▮▮ while managing the highest grossing competition practice. How was she able to build such a high income practice?
How was Manan Lahoty able to run a profitable ECM team in an otherwise unprofitable practice area?
4. What is the impact on Associates, SAs and PAs. Do they get to gain or loose because of this shift? What about junior partners?
5. How much profit will CAM, JSA make because of the newcomers? What extra benefits do these firms get?
(i) With Manan, CAM effectively consolidated the 2 largest and “highly regarded” cap marks teams into 1. I guess that this has significantly increased their ability to control/increase rates in a practice area that isn’t a money printer by any measure. I would also imagine that Yash and Manan (and possibly Lala ji as well) must have had a chat with their business generating Partners and instructed them to not undercut each other otherwise none of this would work.
(ii) With Nisha, it looks like she capitalized on JSA’s want to not be a T2 firm + the fact that equity was opening up with some of their older partners retiring. Mind you, Nisha may have her own clients, but antitrust teams require transaction teams to feed them merger control work especially the USD/EUR/GBP billing transactions. A single LARGE transaction can yield about 2+ crores for the acquirer’s antitrust team. A single LARGE competitor-to-competitor transaction (which will come along very infrequently) may yield more if the competitors are market leaders. But most of those would be referred to the antitrust team by the transaction team. This makes it tough to quantify the pay bump for Nisha and the value add for JSA.
(iii) There is a high degree of PR surrounding these two individuals which is why you pick them up as examples, presumably. Gautam Saha’s shift to TT&A saw a shift of a higher number of Partners and other lawyers, not to mention the amount of money at play being far in excess. A friend at TT&A joked that their Delhi office has basically become “Gautam Saha & Associates”. I wont be surprised if there are other examples of team movements which are skipping my mind at the moment.
In terms of impacts on As/SAs/PAs, there will not be a significant impact on the large majority since these moves are only driven by the personal motivations of the rainmakers. Some of the PAs might become Partners, maybe everyone gets a slight pay bump but that’s about it. All of this is assuming that the juniors have been asked to move - apparently Nisha didn’t invite her fellow TL partners and the juniors mapped to them, although she controlled everyone.
A few more points -
(i) Factually speaking, 30 crores isnt the highest billed by antitrust teams. There are other T1 teams - some bigger than NKU’s and some smaller - which recover more than 30 crores per annum (also, the metric that firms care about is “recovery” and not “billing”). While I am no fan of hers considering the stories I’ve heard, I will concede that there is a good chance that NKU does/did more than 30 crores of recovery per annum. Anyhow, the highest revenues are probably at SAM competition - with around 12 partners (3x of team NKU). They may have a lower profit per partner but would definitely have a higher revenue figure. They simply wouldn’t keep promoting people to Partner and hiring juniors otherwise - and the suggestion that the team is exempt from usual law firm economic rationale is foolhardy. While Shardul’s lalaji vibes aren’t as intense as Cyril, make no mistake that SAM is a money driven law firm like the rest.
(ii) Saying things like “Cravath scale” is just not an accurate way to talk about this - not to mention that the context in which you’ve referred to it also seems inaccurate (i think you meant lockstep?). The Cravath scale - the highest pay for lawyers in the world - refers to a very specific set of numbers, i.e., what Cravath and similarly placed firms pay their lawyers. While there are firms outside the US that pay Cravath (mostly foreign offices of US firms), NO indian firms pay Cravath (unless youre lala ji’s family) because they simply arent at that level as much as some of these firms pretend otherwise. Some of the Indian Managing Partners’ rates (usually 1k USD per hour) are the same as/around those of foreign Associates (junior Associates in foreign Big Law are charged out at USD 700-850 per hour). One just has to look at metrics such as total turnover (some foreign firms rake in USD Billions) and average revenue per lawyer. There are foreign firms with headcounts similar to CAM and TL which make MUCH more. Lastly, there is also the fact that you don’t have lalajis like Cyril and Zia in these Cravath scale firms sucking up a significant chunk of profits - even from highly profitable teams - because they provide the “platform”. The lalas basically capitalise on the lethargy of some rainmakers in terms of setting up admin processes and taking on the risk of some fixed costs. As someone who knows some rainmakers who broke away from T1s to start their own gig, those guys begin to make a LOT more after breaking away.
(iii) While gender inequities do exist, you need to appreciate how they do/dont play out in context of law firms. Many of these “top-performers” do not have a personal life (no spouse, no kids) and they reach a point of emptiness where they are all consumed by work and the thought process is “control these little shits and make money number go up brrrrrrr”. Of the two mentioned in your post, one doesnt have a spouse and children while the other got a spouse many years their junior not too long ago. There is no judgment here, just a statement of fact. There are other rainmakers who are divorced because their spouse didn’t want to put up with the absence and/or have terrible relationships with their children because they were absent. Mind you, some of these children end up having a bad long term trajectory because daddy (it mostly is daddy) compensated for their absence by making their wealth available to the kids without supervision.
Lastly, I am glad lawyers in India are beginning to have conversations like this. Remember, its all about the money - the “prestige” of having your matter mentioned in the newspapers doesnt mean anything. The fact that you spent your nights away in office / on screen doesnt matter. Most Associates won’t make Partner. Most Partners won’t make Equity Partner. Barely any Equity Partner will be a Managing Partner (and none will in a lala set up). Focus on securing the $$$ while youre in the system. To do that, conversations like this are important. To do that, Partners also need to step up and promote these conversations (even if anonymously through this platform) irrespective of the fact that their lala ji MP promotes a different “culture” - remember, you’re not getting the best deal either. Alternatively, they can always dance at lala ke bete ka sangeet and hope to get a few extra pieces of silver thrown at them.