Alpha Partners, the boutique started in 2012 in Noida by former SRGR lawyer Akshat Pande, demerged from Seth Dua Associates (SDA) on 1 April after a full year of operating as SDA’s Noida office.

Alpha has also hired Kunal Arora as an associate partner from Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, where he was a senior associate in Delhi. Arora is a 2010 Symbiosis Law School alumnus, who began his career at IndusLaw, and moved to MNK Law Offices in 2011 until it merged with Cyril Amarchand in 2015.

Pande, who had merged his firm with SDA in April 2016 and joined SDA as its 12th partner, said the firm had gone independent for strategic reasons.

He said that other than the Noida office, Alpha also had a Bangalore office, which was shut down when the firm merged with SDA.

The SDA partnership stood dissolved after the 5 February demise of SDA co-founding partner Sunil Seth, and became the sole proprietorship of co-founder Atul Dua who had also faced some trouble de-freezing the firm’s accounts due to an internal dispute after the dissolution.

Alpha now has 11 fee earners including four partners: Pande (who heads the corporate commercial practice), former Lall, Lahiri and Salhotra (LLS) partner Shabnam Khan (who had joined the firm in May to head the intellectual property vertical), Kunal Arora (who heads the real estate practice as associate partner) and Sumit Roy (who heads the litigation vertical as associate partner).

Khan is a DU Law faculty 2003 alumnus, started her career at data analytics and research firm Evalueserv and then moved to LLS in 2007 where she spent the rest of her career until Alpha Partners with the exception of a short stint at Anand & Anand for four months in 2012.

Pande commented in an email: “Strategically, we are focusing on real estate and infrastructure projects, technology and inbound and outbound M&A/investments. For litigation, we are focusing on NCLT, arbitration (domestic and international). For IP, IP litigation and trademarks filing and prosecution will be the focus area.”