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After that it was not about elite access, it was about having a curious mind to learn about a different culture
Admin@
– ELP has been and continues to be a partnership of lawyers and CAs;
– ELP hires law students meant to be studying full-time, expecting them to bunk classes and work in ELP’s office;
– ELP employs CAs and involves them in the ‘practice of law’ as defined by the Supreme Court in A.K. Balaji.
– ELP’s Tax and Trade Team will soon be functioning as an independent law firm, but in reality owned and controlled by Dhruva Advisors, a CA firm, which is funded by Ryan LLC, a US accounting firm.
Unfortunately, I am not in a position to do this myself.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in A.K. Balaji continues to be in force. It remains the leading authority on:
- - the meaning of “practise the profession of law” under the Advocates Act, 1961 (covering both litigation and non-litigious work such as opinions, drafting and conferences);
- - the rule that, unless another law provides otherwise, only advocates enrolled under the Act may practise law in India; and
- - the position that foreign lawyers and foreign law firms cannot practise Indian law, litigious or non-litigious, without complying with the Act and BCI Rules.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) permits practising CAs to form multi-disciplinary partnerships with members of certain other professional bodies, including advocates who are members of the Bar Council of India, under Regulation 53B of the Chartered Accountants Regulations, 1988 (read with Clause 4 of Part I of the First Schedule to the Chartered Accountants Act, 1949). ICAI even updated Form 18 in 2021 to facilitate such multi-disciplinary firms.
However, Bar Council of India Rules, 1975 (Rule 2 of Chapter III of Part IV, “Conditions for Right to Practice”) prohibit an advocate from entering into a partnership or any other arrangement for sharing remuneration with any person who is not an advocate. ICAI has itself advised its members not to take BCI-enrolled advocates as partners unless and until the BCI rules are amended. That restriction remains in force; In May 2026 the Sales Tax Bar Association made a representation to the Law Ministry and BCI requesting for a change in these regulations, but there has been no progress on that front.
Advocates may practise as sole proprietors or in partnerships/LLPs consisting only of other enrolled advocates. CAs and advocates can collaborate through referrals, consultancy arrangements, or (in some cases) fee-sharing that does not constitute a partnership under BCI rules, but they cannot operate as partners of one firm offering combined legal and accountancy services. Any such structure would expose the advocate to professional misconduct proceedings under the Advocates Act and BCI Rules.
I concede that it is not automatically illegal for a law firm to employ a chartered accountant as staff in a Trade Law practice if the CA does not appear before any court or tribunal. However:
A. if the CA holds a Certificate of Practice, full-time (or even part-time) employment with a law firm is not covered by the general permission in Appendix 9 to the Chartered Accountants Regulations, 1988. That general permission covers only employment under a practising CA or a CA firm. Employment in any other organisation (including a law firm) requires the Council’s specific prior permission under Regulation 190A read with Clause (11) of Part I of the First Schedule to the Chartered Accountants Act, 1949. Taking up such employment without that permission is professional misconduct. If the CA surrenders the COP (or never held one) and works only as a member in service, Regulation 190A does not apply.
2. B. As per the Supreme Court’s ruling in A.K. Balaji (2018), “practice of law” includes non-litigious work such as opinions, drafting and conferences, not only court appearances. A salaried employment relationship, with the CA doing technical or analytical support (for example dumping-margin calculations, customs valuation analysis, trade-data work) and not holding out as a lawyer or appearing, is generally treated as support staff rather than a prohibited partnership or unauthorised practice of law. The arrangement becomes problematic if, in pith and substance, the CA is giving legal advice on Indian trade law, drafting legal submissions, or the firm presents the CA as part of a joint legal-and-accountancy practice. That could engage Sections 29/33/45 of the Advocates Act and the Balaji principle.
Trust this clarifies.
ELP’s website shows that its International Trade Practice has 3 Partners and 3 Associate Partners. Of these 6, 5 are pure lawyers/advocates. One Associate Partner is a CA and a lawyer.
SAN, we expect you will make a speech outlining what the future holds for those not in Tax and Trade - including the support staff. Please broadcast your speech to all ELP offices (including the NOIDA office) through a VC.
And re your point about CA firms, unlike your comments, number of CA firms have maintained a best friend relationship with law firms and vice versa. Look up other instances, by actually doing some work, instead making such comments which expose your lack of knowledge and understanding. Minds far more knowledgeable and experienced than you are would structure the deal so that the final structure is compliant with all regulations.
Let me repeat. Bar Council of India rules do not allow lawyers to partner with any non-lawyer, including CAs, just as Indian advocates are not allowed to partner with foreign attorneys or solicitors.
The two Co-Founders of ELP are prominent members of SILF which lobbies against the entry of law firms. ELP has been regularly contributing to SILF’s coffers so that SILF can resist the entry of foreign law firms. At the same time, ELP has been merrily hiring CAs, and not just in its Tax practice, but also in Trade.
By the way, we could use CAs in Corporate and Banking too, d’ya know?
I’m all for modifying BCI rules so that Indian advocates can partner with CAs and other professionals and also with foreign lawyers.
However, until the rules change, I would like to follow the law.
Come Diwali, once the 60% withheld bonus is in my bank account, I will leave ELP (God willing).
I assume the new law firm to be formed by the TnT partners, which will be controlled by Dhruva Advisors (in violation of BCI Rules) will also become a member of SILF and resist the entry of foreign law firms?
The Trade team includes qualified CAs as well. Welcome emails are sent for freshers too. Please don't spread misinformation or unnecessary negativity, ▮▮▮ ▮▮▮. (#iknowyou)
Also, who are you to drag AB CD through the mud? Just because you add a caveat at the end does not mean that the rest of your comment is dripping with derision at the mere thought of this lowly non-law CA entering the law firm you had to get a law degree to get in. Get real and grow up.
“Where is the rule that requires me to help?”
“Who am I to help?”
“Let me ask my Deans?”
▮▮▮ (elder brother), (imagine a hand gently placed on the shoulder, with due respect) you ARE the VC???
▮▮▮'s English was horrible. but He DID things. BAD things, Good things, but did things. Oh why did he not speak the Queen's, oops, the King's English!
Where are our saviours????
(Clue: drafting emails. After emails. After emails. After emails...)
Well, is it NOW not irritating?? 🙃
(if anyone picks up on the GOT ref, thank you)
But less toxic workplaces also exist, it's all relative. Good luck on your journey!
I have escaped from a horrible team at CAM, ▮▮▮ (insane work pressure, weirdly toxic politics, and super moody partners) and am looking for new gigs. But all the recruiters in the market seem to be staffed to get hires for the most toxic teams in the market that hire all year long (understandable due to high attrition). And when I come to the lovely people of LI, I see that almost all of the teams and their partners have horrible reviews going for them.
I understand anonymity of LI might make people meaner and more critical, but more and more, it seems like finding a nice, sane team is a very utopian idea as either they don't exist, or are never hiring.
Would love to take your read on this!
(free beverages at Gokul {sorry utna hee budget hai} for actually referring or providing some nice leads).
Thanks :)
I work(ed) at ▮▮▮, and today we were informed that the Managing Partner has decided to wind up the business and close the ▮▮▮ group companies.
According to the communication circulated to employees, the stated reasons are an ongoing dispute concerning the office premises, which apparently had a significant impact on the business, coupled with continuous business losses.
The problem is not simply that the firm is shutting down. Businesses fail. Firms have financial difficulties. That's unfortunate but understandable.
The problem is how the employees have been left to deal with the consequences.
We have been told that 30 September 2026 will be the last working day. We were also told that if we find another opportunity before then, we are free to leave earlier. August salary itself has apparently been delayed and is expected to be paid by 10 September.
Think about what this means for people who joined the firm expecting to build their careers here.
Some of us joined recently. Some left other opportunities to join. Some were in the middle of building specialised practices and developing experience. People made career decisions based on the assumption that the organisation they were joining would continue to exist.
And now we essentially have a few weeks to find new jobs and restart our careers.
What is particularly frustrating is the complete lack of meaningful support from the partners/management during this situation, at least from what employees have experienced.
There has been no meaningful career-transition assistance, no structured placement support, no apparent effort to connect affected employees with other firms, and very little guidance about what employees are supposed to do next.
The communication essentially boils down to:
The firm is shutting down.
30 September is your last day.
Keep working until then.
Your documents will be provided later.
That's incredibly difficult to digest when your livelihood and career trajectory are involved.
And I want to be clear: I am not saying that the firm was obligated to somehow guarantee everyone's future employment. Obviously not.
But there is a huge difference between "we cannot save the firm" and "we cannot do anything to help the people whose careers were affected by its collapse."
If management knew that the business was in such serious difficulty, I genuinely wish employees had been given more transparency and earlier warning. Perhaps people could have started looking for opportunities months earlier instead of finding out now and scrambling simultaneously.
What makes this particularly frustrating is that the employees are the ones who are now expected to maintain professionalism, finish ongoing work and ensure a "smooth transition" while simultaneously figuring out how they're going to pay their bills and where they're going to work next month.
I don't know whether the reasons stated in the communication tell the entire story, and I'm not going to pretend I know everything happening behind the scenes.
But I do know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of this decision.
People aren't just entries on a payroll.
There are associates who were trying to establish themselves, juniors trying to build a practice, people who relocated or turned down other opportunities, and employees who genuinely believed they were building something here.
Whatever went wrong at the management/business level, the employees are now paying the price for it.
I'm sharing this because prospective employees should know what happened, and because I hope other people in the legal industry understand that when a firm collapses, the consequences aren't limited to the partners or the balance sheet.
They fall heavily on the juniors and associates who have the least control over the situation.
[Mod: such image does not seem to exist. But this is an interesting read on Tagore and Rakhi https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/art-and-culture/how-rabindranath-tagore-used-raksha-bandhan-as-means-to-prevent-1905-bengal-partition-4785042/ ]
SBA
STATEMENT OF CONDEMNATION
We, the students of the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, unequivocally condemn the demonstrations organised at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on 21–22 August, 2026 under the banner of ‘Reservation Hatao Andolan’ against affirmative action policies guaranteed to members of marginalised caste backgrounds. The demonstration, as well as the actions of the attendees, contained numerous violations of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, and we call for appropriate action against the organisers and the errant participants who made casteist remarks.
The reservation system is an express constitutional mandate. Articles 15(4) and 15(5) permit the State to make special provisions for the advancement of socially and educationally backward classes, and for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, in matters of admission to educational institutions.
Articles 16(4), 16(4A), and 16(4B) extend the same principle to public employment, recognising that formal equality guaranteed under Articles 14 and 16(1) is insufficient where entire communities have been historically excluded from access to education, employment, and dignity. Moreover, the Supreme Court has time and again upheld the constitutional validity of reservation schemes.
However, we are very clear that Constitutional provisions will hardly suffice to explain the relevance of reservations for marginalised groups in the country since these protests, at their core, are anti-constitutional. It is, however, still pertinent to point out that these protests often seek to paint reservation as one of the primary hindrances to the ‘nation's development,’ the logic being that they somehow temper this country’s meritocracy. We do not seek to counter this flawed and casteist understanding of ‘merit’ through this statement. Scholarship on the same is quite accessible, and those who have convinced themselves otherwise are hardly going to change their minds after reading this statement.
Nevertheless, the complete lack of introspection bordering on hypocrisy on the part of groups and individuals who level such allegations against provisions reflect the hegemony of upper caste savarna individuals over almost all political, bureaucratic, academic, economic, and cultural spaces in this country and still having the short-sightedness to pin the blame of all of this on reservations which empirically affect only about five percent of educational and job opportunities in this country. This is the fundamental dishonesty at the heart of the Reservation Hatao Andolan. It treats reservation as though it were an aberration imposed on an otherwise level playing field, rather than a modest and partial correction to a playing field that remains tilted in ways its beneficiaries have simply stopped noticing because the tilt has always worked in their favour.
There is no introspection here, no willingness to ask why sectors with zero reservation, chiefly the private sector, continue to reproduce the same caste concentrations at the top that reservation was designed to address in the public sphere. The silence on this point is not an oversight. It is the entire strategy. Hence, we do not condone demands for dismantling reservations that refuse to reckon with the caste inequalities that necessitated such measures in the first place.
I've been coming to LI for years now, and the first time I opened the convos page was yesterday when I tried to post this. While I'm sure my experience may be different from others, I think the classic home screen is comfortable as well as efficient. The two column layout displays more threads compared to /convos while conveying all of the same information.
If a revamp is necessary, I'd argue the best source of inspiration (which may seem like an unserious suggestion but I fully mean it) are other long-standing anonymous forums such as 4chan. The default view on 4chan is similar to how convos/ looks right now, but it includes a preview of the latest replies on the thread – something that can be considered if the convos view is the default going forward. Catalog view (preferred by its users) has the advantage of displaying more threads simultaneously which is something the current LI homepage is good for too.
In any case, thank you for being this open and transparent, and I'm sure if the users and the mods discuss the type of changes they'd like to see, the new site will be in great shape in no time.
How? Why?
I understand if this is a passion for some of them (HR-styled roles), but most I know are looking for better work-life-balances, and just generally want to leave law.
My question is: does legal recruiting pay anything remotely close to what a T2/T3 law firm in India pays?
Have I been living under a rock of some kind?
1) I learnt the business side of things, which was very refreshing. My Legal Head encouraged me to talk with the business team before beginning to draft any contract/agreement.2) The exposure was immense. Legal teams in companies tend to be small. I attended a few meetings with the CEO and CFO. This was also due to the fact that the company I was interning at was a Mahindra subsidiary, and hence every team was small in general. But generally too, legal teams in-house work directly and constantly with the business heads.
3) However, the quality of people who I worked with was...bad. To say the least. Apart from the GC, the Assistant GC, and the Legal Head, the legal managers in the team were subpar at best. They did not have any working knowledge of law, in general. Some of them were put there by their campus recruiters and some had absolutely no experience apart from in-house jobs in their lives which stunts a person's growth. Many a times, the GC would directly assign drafting to me. But this in no way is to say they were bad people, no one had better knowledge of the business than them. My GC told me this is the exact reason why he needed people like the legal managers in his team so that they help him with "business legal" and he does the "contractual legal" stuff. Which is a pattern I have seen in most companies apart from some tier-1s. I personally found no intellectual stimulation there.
4) The starting salary was dehumanising. The place I interned at paid 3.4LPA to freshers. That threw me off. Tech Mahindra pays some 6-9LPA for freshers, Wipro pays 10LPA, my point being, it does not go beyond 10LPA unless you're in ICICI Bank.
That being said, I was the happiest in those months when I interned. After coming from a brutal tier-1 internship where 1am and 2am was the norm, learning about the business, having team lunches, doing impactful work and being involved in substantial stuff was refreshing to say the least. AND I GOT STIPEND MORE THAN ANY LAW FIRM EVER PAID ME!!??? It made me consider whether I should actually fcuk money and live in peace. Yes, it is an average life (compared to a law firm - money wise), but it's not bad!!!! If you stick by the right people and know your stuff, you could get promoted pretty fast. My GC told me that the trick was to jump ships fast and efficiently early in your career and build and expertise slowly. For eg, if you start out at Tech M, you could move on to Infosys and then on and so forth, basically in the IT/Service/Software legal industry.
I believe, the choice is between money and sanity. Choose wisely and never feel inferior for doing in-house. You're doing a job at the end of day ffs, you're employed. what does one even need in this economy?
What I find more uncomfortable than the course itself is the power dynamic. If your senior someone who decides what work you get, how you are evaluated and what opportunities you receive tells you that a course he is selling is “mandatory”, it isn't really a choice anymore. And isn't mentoring juniors supposed to be part of what a partner does anyway? Ofc there are paid external courses and professional programmes, and people are free to choose them. But asking your own team to pay you separately for a course, while having the authority to make participation compulsory, just feels wrong to me. There is a very thin line between mentoring your team and monetising the position of authority you hold over them. I mean a partners job is to mentor his team and not make them pay for it.