Scoop: Khaitan & Co has poached Luthra & Luthra managing associate Nawneet Vibhaw as an associate partner in Delhi, where he will continue specialising full-time on environmental law as he had been doing at Luthra.

He joined Khaitan yesterday after leaving Luthra late last month. We have reached out to him for comment.

Vibhaw had joined Luthra in June 2015 from Jindal Global Law School to set up the firm’s environmental law practice. At Jindal he had been an assistant professor and assistant dean, as the executive director of its Centre for Environment and Climate Change.

At the beginning of his career, after graduating from Nalsar Hyderabad in 2008, Vibhaw had joined AZB & Partners for a year, completed an LLM in environment and natural resources from Lewis & Clark Law School in the US, followed by just under a year at Trilegal. In 2011 he then joined NLU Delhi as assistant professor and head of its environmental research and advocacy centre.

Vibhaw has also written two books on environmental law and energy law published by LexisNexis in 2014 and 2016.

We were not able to confirm at the time of publication whether anyone will be handling or specialising in environmental law at Luthra going forward.

Luthra managing partner Rajiv Luthra and a Luthra spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment since yesterday.

In the last few months, Luthra has seen trade policy head Santanu Mukherjee and corporate partner Rajesh Chavda leave the firm, with senior partner Vijaya Rao going part-time.

Khaitan, on the other hand, has continued growing rapidly in the last year to have become firmly entrenched as India’s second largest firm with 501 fee-earners and 106 partners as at November 2016, even nipping at the heels of India’s largest firm, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas.

Khaitan had in November hired two indirect tax experts from PwC as directors, and K Law Delhi partner Gautham Srinivas.