Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas Bangalore capital markets partner Arjun Lall has become head of the Southern India region, including Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad, reported Bar & Bench.
Legally India understands that the announcement was made locally around two weeks ago by managing partner Cyril Shroff when rolling out the new South India human resources (HR) structure.
Lall is a 2001 NLSIU Bangalore graduate who began his career at what-was-then Amarchand Mangaldas.
Lall’s counterpart in the Delhi region will be senior AZB & Partners lateral hire Percival (Percy) Billimoria, who will head that office with Delhi partner Gauri Rasgotra as deputy head.
The appointment of Lall as South India head follows a significant streamlining and restructuring of Cyril Amarchand’s internal committee structures earlier this month, which included the elevation of partner Nisha Kaur Uberoi as national competition head, who has since resigned to join AZB & Partners.
Comments
On a related note, Cyril appears to have realised that his "single leader model" was flawed from the very beginning. He has been trying to run CAM (and erstwhile AMSS, mumbai office) like a lala shop, on the lines of typical promoter run companies. But, notwithstanding that how astute he is, he ignored the fact that a professional services firm cannot be run in the same way as a business enterprise. In a law firm, every lawyer has the calibre to generate business on a standalone basis and so there are ego and self respect issues.
It is not that things will be any different now (thanks to baba and mata), but yes, at least they will appear to be different.
office head sounds a bit like a receptionist-aunty. if they mean it they should give a better title. too many heads is making the firm look like raavan'a head. enjoy, velevet voice.
Nivedita I have not worked with but Avinash Umapathy can do a lot worse than be made to report to Arjun. As a lawyer and a person Arjun is miles ahead of Avinash.
In the army reporting and promotions are based on a time-scale till the positions of Colonel and above. One could arguably be reporting to a batchmate after that but I am not sure how that works.
It hardly ever happens in administration. An IAS 1990 batch officer will never directly report to another IAS 1990 batch officer.
In judiciary seniority depends on date of enrollment. The question of being a batchmate doesn't arise.
Right now the GOC Northern Command and the Vice-Chief of the Army are batchmates but the VCOS is a higher position.
In the IAS plenty of Chief Secretaries and Cabinet Secretaries routinely supercede their seniors. Present CS of J&K is junior to four of his seniors who report to him.
In the judiciary HC judges are often directly elevated to the SC bypassing CJs who are senior to them and colleagues who are batchmates (Same date of oath)
Even in law firms while A1s and A3s may not report to their batchmates, SAs and Partners do report to their batchmates and often to their juniors.
So its common to have batchmates reporting to one another.
Interesting. But few examples do not make it a common occurrence. And we are talking about direct reporting.
In states you have state administrative services apart from IAS in which case reporting may not depend on seniority but on service. However, I stand by what I said. An IAS officer will never directly report to his/ her batchmate. I agree that seniority does not matter in SC elevation. But can you say HC judges directly report to SC judges?
Suppose anything can happen in law firms.
Cheers!
Per se there is no problem with people reporting to batchmates. At some level the pyramid will shrink so it becomes inevitable.
A famous case is of Gen. Katoch (1 Para) and Gen. Bhardwaj when the latter was the GOC-in-C Northern Command (see: http://www.livefistdefence.com/2008/04/who-is-lt-gen-pc-bhardwaj.html).
Except that leaders at CAM do nothing except put their own family first.