Hire the best, but pay them much less.
Make them toil, but share with 'em no spoils!

Khaitan is a great place to work

This is good joke. Ask any firm which has had to work, either as a second opinion or cause the client was dissatisfied, on an opinion or a dd report prepared by KCO. They will tel you about the "pain and the horror" of going through it.

Ask KCO why their infrastructure and capital market practices have shrunk so much. The partner who was the head of the infra practice was compelled to focus only on real estate as he had nothing to offer in infra.

They had good clients, especially in infra, but where have they gone? Don't blame the markets, but their work ethics and management. Now they have very few clients and a very small work force.

Bharuchas slipping the ranks is hardly surprising. The best of their senior level people have all left. Its a family firm with ill-tempered partners and which is common knowledge. The firm has hardly grown in past 3 yrs in their profile of mandates or lawyers; and their Delhi office has hardly made any ripples. So hardly surprising!

not to forget some great contribution by Mr. Vaid, Pintu babu and Bharat Anand. Infact its a team effort

Compete with AMSS. The fact that they have been placed at par with AZB reminds me of the India Today Law School Rankings.

KCO is nowhere close to AZB or AMSS in terms of client and partner profile. HK, RBJ and some of the other few partners may be good but the rest of the crop does not bring any work.

Also it is a widely known fact that though HK and RBJ may be good but the bulk of the work is done by the Associates, SAs and PAs. The quality of which at KCO is as bad as it can get.

Does it even exist?

TT&A and Platinum Partners seem to be moving closer to the top 6 bracket fast enough - keeping up the name of their 'best friends' in the Indian market!

In the current state of legal services, size is often a negative for clients, so yes, size does matter.

It is great to see smaller firms move up the ranks. However it is also extremely deplorable to see slightly larger firms like Juris Corp try to hang onto their rankings with 2010 data ( when they were much larger) and also having profiles on the net featuring non existent partners ( who have left long ago) Much like the politicians trying to cling onto their chairs

By the way, you should note that client satisfaction and the other scores are statistically weighted out of 10.

So, more or less, a 10 is equivalent to the best single aggregate score by any one client to a firm (even if it was only a B+, say), whereas a 0 on that scale could have been a C- rating from one client to one firm, say.

Therefore it's hard to interpret them as absolutes, but are more useful for comparison.

[quote name="Guest"]Kian, any idea on how were the clients chosen by RSG?[/quote]
Million dollar question, most of the places they maintain confidentiality about the same….if sources are not correct the what is the guarantee of the ranking or report…must have taken hefty charges for the same… unbelievable that Dua and CB are beyond 30…

We'll add a note to the article - those links actually point to pages on Legallypedia, which is run by Legaly India but which anyone can edit and update.

A fair number of those articles for some of the bigger firms were updated somewhat recently by very talented Legally India intern Kritika Khanijo, others admittedly need a lot of work to bring up to date and up to scratch.

We're working on it, but if you think you can help us build a more useful resource about the legal profession to increase transparency and publicly available information, please get in touch with us, we'd love to hear from you!

Have received a respose from RSG on #11's question:
[quote]Law firms were asked to submit five client references. In addition, RSG Consulting contacted over 500 independent clients from our database of Indian and foreign companies to complete scorecards, and interviewed 100 of the major purchasers of legal services in India. Clients were targeted in order of size (by revenue) and business over the past 18 months (according to information from Zephyr deals database). [/quote]

Do let me know if you have any questions and I'll be happy to pass it on.

[quote name="Observer"]The data abouut the particular firm ( whose name has a hyperlink in the article) seems to be much outdated
For eg ALMT 's page is updated in Dcc 2010. Even Juris Corp's data pertains to 2010 and since then it has lost 6 partners and about 30 associates.Therefore if the rankings are based on 3 yr old data how authentic are they?[/quote]
The very credibility of the rankings is in question if they are based on outdated data. As stated above for example Juris Corp had peaked in 2010-11 and since then lost several Clients, partners and seniors and also forced to shut down some of its practice areas. In short it is a different firm ( possibly with much lower rankings) than it was in 2010-11
Therefore in the interest of correct journalistic reporting it is imperative that LI take this up with RSG so that the users of this report get a balanced picture and are not misled by firms that "game' the system

Yes it is, you can order it for GBP 5000.

You mean Indus Law is doing well

Uh, have you read neither the article nor the caption?

Wait till you see their end product. Will make you regret every bit. Clients that stick to KCO do so simply because the firm has the lowest fee structure amongst the top 7-8 firms.

No wonder KCO has been asking so many lawyers to leave and has not had any significant deals being reported for more than a year.

Check out the recent posts on Legally India on major deals in infra, M&A, etc., and you will get the correct picture. The bubble of KCO will burst soon.

KCO's only hope it that the partners who have been recruited over the last few months bring in enough work to counter the dead weight of most of the other partners that KCO carries.

Another problem that KCO has is the sub-standard quality of its Associates, SAs and PAs. Till their evaluation process is not based on merit and work, but whims and fancies of a few, they will never come out of this mess.

Ok, so which other reports are there?

Chambers and Legal 500? My personal perception: I don't think they change much year-on-year, which doesn't make it very interesting to cover, plus their research can be pretty thin I've heard. As far as I understand it, both methodologies basically consist of asking the firm to fill in a form about which practice areas the firm is good in, and to give a handful of client and deal references.

I understand that usually a junior person sitting in London, many of whom do this as summer job for a few months and then never return because the job is so boring, then automatically send mailshots or calls to those clients, asking them to rate that and possibly other firms. Large firms with huge PR departments have an inherent advantage, because they can file quality submissions (which take a lot of time and work) in every conceivable practice area to get a ranking, whereas smaller firms might not even be able to manage one or two.

That person is probably also doing the same for a handful of other jurisdictions (both directories produce directories for nearly every country on earth, I think).

Law firms are also asked to advertise in those directories, though I haven't heard any actual allegations of this influencing the rankings, there are whispers - not sure if anyone has anecdotes on this?

Plus there is an inherent upward drift of most firms in those directories, since it's very hard and rare for the directories to downgrade firms a tier (because the firms start complaining and crying to high heaven), so most of the researchers become risk averse and by default accept previous years' rankings in order not to cause a fuss.

Those directories' India knowledge is therefore more limited arguably, than RSG's, where the same people have travelled to India several times for each year's report over the past years, interviewing (usually managing) partners and some clients face to face, as well as on the phone from London.

Maybe my understanding of Chambers, Legal500 and the like is wrong though - please correct me if you disagree - but my perception is that RSG's methodology and focus is slightly better, though there's less width outside of the generic 'corporate law' bracket.

Indian law firm or lawyer awards? Not sure if it's worth even commenting on that?

Who's Who has a slightly better reputation I've heard, though to be honest I'm not really too familiar with it and normally it seems like it's the usual suspects and sometimes some randoms who make it in.

Anything else that's worth covering that we don't?

Also note, just like we've stopped covering the magazines' Indian law school rankings properly, we have to take a call on what is necessary to report and what isn't worth readers' time (though we're bound to get this wrong sometimes for some readers).

E.g., we report on the mergermarket M&A deals database rather than Bloomberg or Venture Intelligence or VCCEdge or half a dozen others, which are of comparable quality. Why don't we cover all of them? Honestly, we as well as readers are somewhat comfortable using those rankings now and in the interests of consistency, it's ok to continue.

Finally, it's worth noting that most league tables are essentially clever advertising, made purely for marketing and PR reasons: if a newspaper or website covers them, the consultancy that made them hope to sell more copies of a report, service, ads, etc.

As such, we have a presumption against publishing and promoting third party data or reports, unless there is a compelling reason for publishing them because for example it is unique, or is worth highlighting or adds value to our (and hopefully our readers') understanding.

RSG's report is by no means perfect or without problems, but in my somewhat considered view it's definitely more interesting than the others at the moment.

Feedback welcomed,
Kian

[quote name="ex-AM"]I left amarchand sometime back to join KCO and havent regretted the decision one bit. This is a great place to work. I am convinced by 2015, KCO will replace AM from the top position.[/quote]

Could you not handle the pressure that you to make the switch. KCO offers great work life balance as they have little work. Soon either you will follow suit as 40-50 other lawyers of that firm and leave in frustration or they will ask you to leave as they can no longer bear the extra cost.

Good Luck

Hmmm I guess thats an excellent reason for client diversifying work and picking horses for courses, instead of giving all the work to Biglaw.

Very true that some of associates/sr. associates and PAs in the big law firms have ego that exceed even that of their partners'. This is something that irks the client. A little modesty and sensitivity will greatly help.

Kian - The point that "Guest" was trying to make was that RSG should have acknowledged the fact that they did not receive any information from WG and should have put an asterix or mentioned that these were 2011 statistics. Even in 2011, the firm had more than 13 partners, so once again these statistics are wrong and are a way for RSG to cover its own you-know-what.

If a firm has refused to share information / stats - then what is the harm in mentioning it? I simply don't understand the need for misrepresentation. Not once in this report does that fact come out. Would you agree?

How, then, can someone reasonably rely on such rankings? If there's a mistake in some figures, why should we believe the genuineness of the others?

A very fair representation of the top tier firms. AMSS has another advantage- a lot of government run enterprises are also their clients, which in a way ensures that despite bad market conditions, work never dries up.
KCO has a Birla and RPG Groups as their flagship groups which are catered to by the best in the firm. But what other clients get is utter rubbish. Hopefully this may change with better quality partners being poached in the last 12 months who are also making it rain for them.
JSA is JSA. Best working environment but in with Mr Jyoti Sagar retiring, the firm may need to sit back and re-valuate a lot of things.

"Others... lets not waste time..." but why not? Just because they are not top 4, they are not worth discussing, working for? giving work to?

Do you really think KCO doesn't have office politics? Its great that you're probably not involved in it and you don't mix with "that" crowd, but I assure you no firm, even KCO, is free from office politics - between partners, PAs, SAs and Associates or HR (whether with other members of KCO or within the HR department!) And, doesn't KCO have cameras as well? And what about keeping a log of entry and exit timings? What about HR calling associates into office and chastising them for reaching office at 10:30 when they've left at 5? What about yearly evaluations? Are they fair and transparent?

HK is a wonderful guy though - you're certainly right about that. And most partners at KCO are definitely brilliant.