J Sagar Associates (JSA) partner Amit Kapur was elected senior partner-to-be by JSA’s equity partners at a meeting in Chennai today.

He will take over on 1 April 2017 from outgoing senior partner Berjis Desai, who is retiring on schedule on 31 March 2017.

Kapur is the highest biller in the firm, specialising in the projects and regulatory space with a team of four other equity partners.

He chairs JSA’s regulatory and policy practice and had been a JSA partner since 2000, having headed up its infrastructure practice since 1997.

He and his team specialise on projects and regulatory work relating to infrastructure, while Kapur, in particular, has developed a profitable niche of representing clients in regulatory disputes, with an estimated Rs 40 crore per year practice last year.

The elevation of Kapur to senior partner will be a major boon for JSA’s partnership, which has reeled and been in need of stability ever since Mumbai partner Akshay Chudasama and his team of four partners decamped to Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas in late 2015 and securities star Somasekhar Sundaresan announced that he would go independent in March 2016.

All that happened against a background of the firm’s founder and namesake Jyoti Sagar having officially retired in 2013, with senior partner Berjis Desai (a nearly de facto JSA co-founder, who had set up its Mumbai office) due to retire by 2017.

In 2015 Kapur had been in the running for managing partner against six others, in what is probably India’s only fully democratic management election at an Indian law firm.

The managing partner posts eventually by September 2015 went to Dina Wadia and Shivpriya Nanda jointly as co-managing partners, by internal consensus.

We have reached out to Kapur and other JSA partners for comment.

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