Khaitan & Co has promoted real estate associate partner Abhishek Sharma and competition counsel Avaantika Kakkar to equity partnership in Mumbai, while hiring start-up litigator Rahul Sahay in Delhi as an associate partner.
Sharma was promoted as associate partner in 2011, having joined Khaitan in 2005 and graduating from GLC Mumbai in 2002.
Kakkar, who is a 2003 graduate from ILS Pune, will co-head the competition practice in Mumbai.
The counsel role is an alternative to partnership at Khaitan, either as a permanent career track if a senior lawyer wishes to focus on execution but less on business development and rainmaking, or as a way for those with family obligations or health issues to advance without the accompanying travel and rainmaking time-commitment.
The promotions were announced at the firm today, after in April the firm promoted three lawyers in Delhi to associate partner (Joyjyoti Misra in corporate, and Prateek Kumar and Susmit Pushkar in litigation), and two in Mumbai (Adheesh Nargolkar and Niren Patel).
The equity partnership promotion process in Khaitan consists of an in-house assessment by the senior committee, and a so-called “behavioural assessment” test and 360-degree appraisals assessed by an external HR consultant over two to three years.
The 360 degree appraisal, which was rolled out several years ago at the firm, includes appraisals from peers, and senior, junior, support and administrative staff.
Litigation lateral returnee, Delhi
Sahay used to work at Khaitan between 2005 and 2006 before joining Luthra & Luthra, going independent in 2008 and setting up his own firm, Sarthak Advocates and Solicitors, in 2010.
The 2005 NLIU Bhopal LLB graduate and 2008 Oxford University BCL holder has now rejoined Khaitan as an associate partner in Delhi to deal with litigation.
He confirmed his joining to Legally India but was not available for comment at the time of going to press.
Comments
haha.. just joking around Kian...pls dont take it personally.. You guys are doing a great job. :)
It could also be exclusive, or it could have been reported elsewhere.
Exclusive is when we know that no one else has the story, it hasn't been press released, etc.
The Khaitan promos we were sitting on since morning, assuming we had time till the afternoon to publish it, until we noticed B&B had just posted a story so we pushed ours to press a little more quickly than we had planned :)
I very much doubt that it is an equity partnership in the real sense of the term.
Of course, I am not doubting his credentials or competence. It is indeed a great achievement to become an associate partner in a premier law firm. My point was that even if one has the credentials or competence (good enough to be made an associate partner in a top law firm) it is difficult to start on your own. The same client, who he may have approached for work but may not have given him any work, may be now entrusting all their work to him as he now has Khaitan backing. That was my point
Once again, congrats to Rahul!
ha ha ha...Human Resource principles stem from human behavioural psychology, and this is bound to be subjective, given a standard stimulus each person will respond differently, unfortunately legal industry suffers from naivety (:P) of its own people who think that fairness and equitable distribution of performance linked rewards can be as straight as numbers!!! An organization’s maturity is reflected through its processes, systems and efforts to deal with such complex behavioural subjectivity. I recommend reading books and principles on Law Firm Management, don’t know much about Khaitan, but such clichéd comments to denigrate HR processes and trashing every form of appraisal system as hogwash, smoke screen, waste of time are nothing new and very common among the ones who question everything with dash of ego and belief called “intellectual superiority”
These guys are probably doing their so called "360" evaluations !!