One of IndusLaw's co-founding partners, Tapas Misra, who became an of counsel at the firm 18 months ago and headed up its tax practice, has left with his team of two to start a tax boutique firm in Noida on 1 March.

The firm, named MnM Legal, has two partners, Tapas Misra and his wife Sangita Misra, who is a lawyer and will be managing the firm.

The firm also includes associate Eliane Muhury, who specialises in indirect taxes and service tax, and KK Samantaray, who is a chartered accountant and advocate.

Tapas Misra is a direct tax lawyer and was previously director and head of tax litigation at RSM & Co in Delhi, tax and regulatory services director at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and had spent 15 years as an advocate at Vaish Associates after graduating from Delhi University in 1990.

Muhury said: “We work with both small and medium enterprises, companies, individuals, we do tax assessments, right to representing them even before the Supreme Court.”

Tapas Misra added that the firm has already begun working directly with several corporates and two start-up companies, to which the firm could offer a more cost-effective service than the larger firms.

“It is a competitive space actually and I have traditionally been dealing with some very large corporates and I have direct competition with some very large firms,” he said. However, he added that many of the larger service providers in the tax space could not offer the right kind of expertise at lower billing rates requested by clients so their performance could suffer.

He said he continued having a good relationship with IndusLaw but that he left because “most of the partners there are focused on private equity and corporate[-transactional]”, so a tax lawyer could not play the kind of role he could in a smaller or start-up set up.

IndusLaw co-founding partner Gaurav Dani commented: “Tapas had left the IndusLaw Partnership almost 18 months ago and moved into the position of an ‘of counsel’ for tax litigation. It was agreed when he resigned as a Partner that the firm would support him as a tax counsel so that he may be able to start his own practice.

“We are happy for him and will continue to support him in the future.  We wish him all the best.”