Law firms

IPL (Indian Premier League) broadcasters Sony Entertainment Television yesterday filed a Rs 147 crore recovery suit in the Bombay High Court through Luthra & Luthra against the BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) and its media rights licensee World Sports Group (WSG).

Juris Corp has promoted finance partner designate Veena Sivaramakrishnan to full partnership and has lured sole practitioner Anil Mehar Singh Jarial to join the firm as a dispute resolution and real estate partner in Mumbai.

Dua Associates Mumbai partner Mahernosh Humranwala and his team are on notice to join Tatva Legal next month and will head up the half-year-old firm's Mumbai growth efforts, which was formed by 50 former Dua lawyers.

Eleven out of 171 candidates - or 6 per cent - passed April's examination of the Bombay Incorporate Law Society to become Bombay solicitors, as none of the 30-odd first-time test takers managed to clear the exam.

Read on to download and try your hand at the most recent test paper.

Kochhar & Co's former technology and media law partner Rodney Ryder who started up IP and IT boutique practice Scriboard in April has entered into a strategic alliance with legal process outsourcing (LPO) company Overlegen.

Wipro Technologies is the third legal process outsourcing (LPO) company in almost as many months to announce that it is providing LPO services to software giant Microsoft. But like the others it has been providing LPO services to Microsoft for years. The real story here is how good the Redmont company has been getting at outsourcing legal work.

Naik Paranjpe & Co has successfully restrained the Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce (KFCC) from preventing the release of the film Raavan in Karnataka after it won a rare favourable interim order from the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for clients Reliance Big Entertainment yesterday evening.

Link Legal has put pan-Indian growth further on top of its agenda, having opened up a new Mumbai office by relocating a young Delhi partner and hiring former GVK in-house counsel V Akshay Babu as its second partner in its Hyderabad office.

AZB & Partners was the busiest Indian M&A firm in the months of April and May advising on a total of seven takeovers, followed by Trilegal and Amarchand Mangaldas but foreign firms picked up by far the greatest slice of Indian M&A mega-value deals benefiting from increasing Indian outbound activity.

Amarchand Mangaldas Bangalore advised Kalanithi Maran on his Rs 740 crore purchase of Link Legal-advised low-cost carrier SpiceJet from two sellers, which were represented by AZB Mumbai and Naveen Goel Law Offices in Delhi.

The law ministry is planning to start up an Indian Legal Service (ILS) styled along the lines of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) in a bid to entice top law graduates away from high-paying corporate law firms.

AZB & Partners, Trilegal, Wadia Ghandy and legal process outsourcing (LPO) company Pangea3 have hiked their basic starting salary packages to as high as Rs 11.4 lakh per year, which makes AZB as the top-paying legal recruiter in Legally India's new law firm salary table.

SRGR Law Offices, which was formed in November 2009 by four former FoxMandal Delhi partners, is now operating in a new office after separating from co-founding litigation partner Gaurav Bhatia after strategic differences on the future direction of the firm.