Newsletters

Welcome back to Legally India’s newsletter and apologies for the long delay. The good news is, however, that this issue is packed with more exciting news and analysis than ever before.

The Legally India newsletter has been absent for a little while but things have been busy at India Legal Inc, and at Legally India towers.

There has been no management restructuring more eagerly awaited in the Indian law firm world than Amarchand’s most recent one. Now that it’s out, the headline is certainly dramatic: the firm wants to double in size in the next six years to 1,000 lawyers, which would approach the size of London or New York headquarters of the largest global firms. Question is, can it?

Last week British lawyers made a push for India again with Lord Chancellor and justice secretary Ken Clarke turning up with entourage and rekindling the liberalisation talks that had become a little tepid of late. But are they following the right strategy?

Last Monday's buzz was all about Justice Markandey Katju’s retirement, one of India’s most well-known and divisive apex court judges.

In the seemingly never ending story of Indian legal market liberalisation a new player has entered the field.

Terror became more than a familiar background noise last week for lawyers as a bomb killed and maimed outside Delhi’s High Court.

Lawyers generally have a conservative relationship with technology although once embraced it can become (sometimes unhealthily) symbiotic. The general argument goes: “Things have always worked for me this way, why do I need anything to change?”

Anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare has eaten again. It was the climax of the single biggest news story of the year that pushed other headlines off the frontpages for weeks. Although ostensibly a legal question the average lawyer tried to go about his or her business.

Independence is a quality as prized by lawyers as it was celebrated by India yesterday. But as firms grow larger, they get more dependent on each of their partners while subsuming the individual into the collective.

This week’s newsletter – in an experimental new Monday-morning slot – looks at what firms and lawyers get up to in their middle-age. Apparently quite a lot…

Fast movers this week in Legally India’s email newsletter round-up, including the CCI, government bodies and prize clients.

The equity at some traditional Mumbai solicitors firms (and others) has always been notoriously inert.

Mumbai, exhibiting that clichéd resilience much loved by commentators, continued with its business despite taking shocks and wild media rumours that would dent the spirits of many other cities. While the financial capital continues to live, the legal profession faced its own share of shocks: one new Anglo-Indian best friendship, a new law minister and the loss of its solicitor general and probably also the Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman.

As billions of dollars of Keralite treasure may ultimately end up exactly where they have always been, India’s lawyers generally do not.

Managing a law firm tends to become harder rather than easier with size. Acknowledging this, in what is still a largely symbolic step albeit with potential future significance, AZB Mumbai has created a new top-level management function outside of the name partners.