Less than three-year-old firm RDA Legal has re-branded to PXV Law Partners and started an office in Mumbai by relocating its newly elected managing partner Rohit Das, while hiring three lateral senior associates from Amarchand, AZB and P&A as lockstep partners.
Managing and co-founding partner Rohit Das has relocated to Mumbai with a senior associate and an associate. They are currently based in temporary office space in Churchgate while closing negotiations for roughly 1,000 square foot of office space in South Mumbai’s Nariman Point, with the idea to expand quickly.
Das said: “For a full service national law firm Mumbai is a significant place to be both from a commercial angle and strategic point of view. It was the right time to go for Mumbai.”
He added that they would initially focus on corporate, finance and litigation work, targeting both local and longer-standing clients. “We have got a good response of new local clients and organisations we’ve been working with nationally - a lot of their transactions are routed out of Mumbai.”
Re-brand and structure
Effective 1 January 2011 RDA has also adopted the name PXV, which is short for Peak Fifteen and was the name of Mount Everest when the mountain was first surveyed, explained Das.
“For a professionally managed firm there are a lot of issues if you have a named partner, especially if you have a lockstep model,” he said. “There is a greater sense of ownership in the firm and it is more neutral and professional.”
Last month the firm also held its first management committee elections and Das was unanimously elected by the rest of the partnership to continue as managing partner for a two-year term.
Since April 2010 PXV, or RDA as it was then called, operated a 20-year lockstep, explained Das, with every equity partner advancing and accruing five points per year up to a maximum equity share equivalent at 100 points unless the advancement is vetoed by a “substantial majority” of the rest of the partners.
He added that none of the partners, including himself, were currently above the six-year level on the 20-year lockstep. “We wanted to keep ourselves low in the lockstep to give more equal opportunity to other members of the firm,” said Das. “We are quite young as a law firm and each of us needs that incentive and career path.”
Partnership expansion
Three new partners have joined PXV on its lockstep in the past six months swelling the ranks of the firm’s equity partners to seven, in addition to non-equity salaried partner Anuj Sahay.
Former AZB & Partners Delhi senior associate G. T. Thomas Phillippe and Amarchand Mangaldas Mumbai principal associate Deepto Roy joined PXV in December 2010, and P&A Associates senior associate Shobha Singh in August of last year.
Roy said: “My intention is to develop energy and infrastructure practice in PXV. The firm already has that practice and I would look to develop it both from inside [that is to expand the team] as well as service the existing clients.
“It was a great learning experience at Amarchand and to leave the largest firm to join a start up is quite a challenge in terms of the responsibilities and work.”
Roy spent five-and-a-half years with Amarchand Mangaldas in its projects and infrastructure team after graduating from NUJS Kolkata.
Singh had completed three-years with P&A Law Offices in Delhi, before which she was an in-house counsel at ICICI Bank in Mumbai for two years after completing her LLB in 2005.
Singh told Legally India that she was excited to be a part of the new venture and great vision and would focus on restructuring the corporate transactional division of the firm.
AZB Delhi managing partner Ajay Bahl said: “Thomas informed us that wanted to be an entrepreneur and start practice on his own with some friends. We wish him the best and he continues to remain on very good terms with us.”
Amarchand and P&A spokespersons or partners were unavailable for comment at the time of going to press.
The firm was founded in April 2008 and has offices in Delhi of around 12 lawyers and roughly eight lawyers each in Bangalore and Kolkata.
PXV, or RDA as it was then called, also has in place a lockstep equity partnership since April 2010, and has a best-friend referral relationship with French firm DS Avocats.
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and to LI-"at the time of going to press"..seriously!!! how jali!
(1) all the existing "partners" are from NUJS and that makes it seem more of an old boys' club of sorts; {Response: Nothing wrong with that. Some of the top corporations were started by people who went to the same university – Google (Brin and Page were at Stanford together); Facebook (Harvard). In a partnership, you need people you trust as partners, so what better way to start a law firm.}
(2) Apart from Roy, none of the others has any experience of note - Das himself has less than two years experience in any firm other than his own, Thomas joined AZB quite late into his career and Singh has only the LPO experience of Pathak; {Response: At his level, Roy is one of the best project finance lawyers in the country. Das, in his short stint at Amarchand, is still ‘the’ benchmark of associates at Amarchand - and who is to say that the experience of establishing and running a law firm does not constitute experience. Thomas, prior to AZB was at Trilegal – you should consider checking up your facts. And Pathak & Associates is an LPO – seriously?? – then damn they pay well for an LPO!!}
(3) The firm has renamed itself into something that sounds like a chemical, thereby losing whatever little goodwill the four years of the RDA named carried. Long term viability of such a firm would be very low. {Response: I concede. Agree with you on this one.}
It is always easy to tear something down - it's much harder to build it up.
Interesting responses, but perhaps you will concede that -
1. Having all the partners from one institution creates a perception issue in an Indian law firm. This is not the US and law is not the IT industry where it is reasonably certain that talent gets recognition and pale geeks writing code may through hard work go up the ladder. On the contrary, Indian firms such as Amarchand, etc. are quite the reverse and remain rooted as a family business often with a layer of NLSIU partners in between That itself is a burden to overcome for every non-NLSIU associate. Hence my belief that many talented (non-NUJS) graduates who have a choice may not want to associate themselves with P15.
2. The lack of experience is undoubtedly the biggest stumbling block. everything in India works on contacts and contacts are established only through experience. Even senior associates with 10 years of experience in reputed firms have difficulty sourcing work, so unless Das has a benefactor, I don't see his firm breaking into the same league as even ARA Law.
Roy has a good reputation for being a capable lawyer in Amarchand but there are many capable lawyers. to say he is one of the best project finance lawyers in the country after five (or is it six) years is being too generous.
P&A is for the most part an LPO and the bulk of their revenue comes from abroad. No doubt they pay well but that is a reflection of how successful the LPO business model is. Time spent in P&A is as good as time spent in Borneo (metaphorically). As for Das being a benchmark, surely you are taking that too seriously.
My belief is that a few more years in the industry would have equipped this lot far better and given the backgrounds that the partners have, there is nothing in it for even an SME company to choose them for advisory services. Perhaps their goal is to be an LPO - that might well work out. Mainstream legal practice - very doubtful.
Very idealistic. Try telling that to any group of associates in a white shoe firm and you'll have a riot on your hands. I suppose this sort of thing never strikes anyone until they are themselves in such a soup - and feeling like an outsider is in a closed group can be very frustrating - I know about it as a 'brown' face clerking for a 'white' american judge and his staff of upper class WASPs (white-anglo-saxon-protestent).
That's why an organisation should not only be fair but must appear to be fair. You cannot instill confidence in the lower ranks when the entire upper management is from the same univ and perhaps even the same class (or same ethnic, religous, linguistic or income group for that matter). It may not be well known but many of the best firms (and law schools) worldwide deliberately have a diversity policy to avoid this.
With such a setup, I believe the new firm will have a hard time attracting students from places other than NUJS.
India needs more Rohit Dasses and fewer Shroffs and Khaitans!!
Isn't trilegal an example of a small firms making it big?
It all depends on how well they work and how well connected they are..
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