Scoop: PwC has been growing its regulatory and advisory practice though the Big Four have generally not been taking on law firms head-on
Former Algo Legal partner Archan Chakraborty and principal associate Vijay Santosh have joined Big Four global consultancy and accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in Bangalore as director and associate director respectively.
Chakraborty and Santosh specialise in M&A, private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) work; at PwC they will be joining its regulatory practice, which is understood to include around 10 to 15 members, including economists and business folks.
Chakraborty and Santosh had joined Algo after its founding from Themis Associates, which Algo had absorbed nearly wholesale alongside a raft of other lateral hires, since setting up in August 2019.
Chakraborty had been with Themis for nearly four years as a partner, after having joined from Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas in Mumbai in 2016.
Santosh had joined Themis in in 2017 from Trilegal Bangalore, where he had worked for two years after stints in Mumbai at Desai & Diwanji, Rajani Associates and UniversalLegal since 2009.
Both joined PwC around February of this year, having left Algo around December 2019, and we have reached out to them for comment.
We have also reached out to PwC for comment.
Algo managing partner Sandeep Kapoor commented: “All the best to both. Great lawyers and colleagues.
“Wish them very best for future.”
Big Four India ambitions?
PwC Delhi-based partner Anshul Jain had joined the Big Four in Delhi in late 2018 from L&L Partners, where he was a corporate and M&A partner.
Jain had joined PwC’s regulatory and M&A vertical but is understood and is now part of the deals and tax team, where he is involved in deal making, structuring and consultancy work. Jain is a dual-qualified lawyer and company secretary, though we understand that he has surrendered his Bar Council of Delhi registration.
Globally and in Asia most Big Four consultancies have heavily entered the legal market and poached numerous partners and lawyers from law firms.
In India, most of the Big Four have been much more cautious and conservative, which includes staying away from litigation beyond fora where accountants or company secretaries are permitted to appear.
However, as tax advisers, the Big Four are all already knee-deep in transactional advisory services, so adding qualified lawyers to advise on regulation and the lay of the laws of the land (presumably without signing legal opinions), is a bit of a business and client service no-brainer for them.
And in any case, the Big Four work closely with transactional law firms, including referring work to them so in India, at least, they are not looking to compete head-on with law firms yet.
Comments
Here is how employee transfer worked according to a boss - new management turn up one fine morning attempting to console the transferred employees whose puzzled for months even listening to rumours of firm being shut. Ask them to start working from a new building from tomorrow. HR to walk in asking for signatures on two documents - resignation letter and new employment letter - the copies of which will never be given to you. And yeah, no hikes (they call it same terms of employment) ...
Does this ring any bell ma friend ? It did for many who never had a choice (yeah job matters for ppl living on rolls) ... Hallelujah.
SILF opposes entry of foreign law firm (which will substantially benefit Indian lawyers), and SILF sits silently as these accountants eat into work of Corp lawyers.
SILF is interested in only protecting interests of founding partners of law firms. And also, organising cricket tournaments.
Interesting to see how the law firms would insulate against such intrusion by Big4s.
But on the other side is the client (read consumer) who is spoilt today for choices, ranging from the so called magic circle firms to the startup law firms emerging every single day - wouldn't you let the consumer choose his product to his wisdom if he sees credit in the seller ? No ?
Oh yeah, definitely a story that can be covered as LinkedIn are all about their apologies and criticisms.
If they didn't issue an apology, then the narrative would have been about their unrepentant shamelessness. When they have issued an apology, it is about their ulterior motive to 'get rid of the talk'. No matter what one does, there would always be detractors it seems.
Besides I now really want to know why NUJS cancelled their courses ( lack of quality perhaps?) and there’s all these whispers about [...] also! So much smoke near this man- there has to be a fire somewhere.
It’s relevant cause it can expose a pattern of horrible sexist behavior that a prominent [...] player in this sector who encourages a lot of youngsters to look up to him.
No one forced RM to do this webinar - and no one forced him to invite KS, and no one forced him to say the stuff he said or to yell at Avanti- this mess is entirely self created - perhaps that’s why you want to find enemies outside - find a way to claim victim hood for yourself. Pathetic.
p.s. Lacking English education isn't a big deal in my opinion, but having the temerity to mistake two completely unrelated pieces of having been written by the same person owing to similarity in 'tone' and 'language' despite lacking such education is still a mark of stupidity.
His clients can and have held him to account - if you go by the whining of his employees on Facebook and other outlets. As have so many students who have left. Also a stakeholder in what happens when this guy is allowed to talk to young children are parents and other educators and society itself.
That is not the KKK. The kkk killed people simply for being black - without any proof that they’d done anything - there is no need for anyone to provide proof that ramanauj is a sexist - he proved it himself in the video and the following essays on self preserving he posted on social media.
[img]https://media2.giphy.com/media/ujv7dYpKwcoHwzNTUB/200.gif[/img]
tl;dr: Our long-standing policy is that we don't private legal education players at all editorially, for better or for worse.
So, some lengthy thoughts on this and LI's decision (so far) not to cover it. Primarily, by way of editorial policy, LI has generally (since forever) never covered news in editorial relating to service providers to the legal industry at all. Since lawyers are LI's primary audience, we get lots of approaches for publishing PR or puff pieces (as well as advertising sometimes) from those offering products or services to lawyers. So this policy makes it easier to simply say no to editorial, rather than battle the (sometimes) sophisticated PR and content marketing machinery. It can also be difficult to draw the line between such PR and advertising, in this context, LI has elected not to have to spend time making such decisions day in day out.
For example, unlike the main areas that we cover - law firms, legal education and, to some extent, regulation of the profession - we don't cover people hires or new business ventures or new office openings or successes at the LawSikhos, MyLaws, LexisNexises or EBCs, for instance (unless they strongly and inevitably overlap with our other areas - more on this below).
But if it is an editorial policy not to accept spin from service providers, then is it fair that we only cover their failures? I feel that such an approach would be problematic and ethically a little murky.
As far as I recall, a few exceptions to the above have been made when what such service providers do strongly overlaps with those areas that we do cover (i.e., the rise (and fall) of the bar exam, senior moves between the sectors or larger trend pieces / features, relating to such sectors). Happy to dig out some examples if interested.
That said, my personal opinion in this specific case (though I haven't seen the full video or read everything about it): a (small) company and CEO screwed up by making a terrible (presumably lockdowned) judgment call that a sexist webinar would be appropriate, then reacted badly when confronted about it live on camera, a shitstorm ensued mostly on social media, company apologised, CEO apologised a bit too late (but eventually) and admitted to sexism and thanked everyone who called him out about it (in something like 100 tweets), while Twitter shitstorm continues growing with calls for CEO's head / sacking, etc. In short, as so many things Twitter, it seems to have its own momentum and might blow up further into mainstream media or might die down. But at the end of the day, I'm not sure what LI or comments here could substantially add to this beyond what's already all over Twitter?
Happy to hear readers' thoughts, in any case.
Don’t you have a duty to your readers especially because you’ve had these people advertise on your platform before?
And this issue in particular should be reported on as a legal education matter no? Considering these were young lawyers/ law students participating on this seminar? And considering we seminars are likely the only consistent learning resource for so many students during this time?
Just like we don't cover the construction sector or the advertising or IT industry or what happens in engineering colleges (even if law graduates may be involved in all of these somewhere), in this case, we have always drawn a clear editorial line and that we don't cover private legal education providers, unless there's an element that is directly related to our core topics.
That said, the behaviours and decisions made seem to be pretty hard to excuse, and unsurprisingly very few people have (even from the company and CEO himself, who eventually mea culpa'd). While there have been a lot of words spilled on Twitter and some opinion pieces in various places, it's pretty hard to disagree with those and there's no real debate to be had here.
At the same time, no one has written any news stories as far as I'm aware, because I am not sure there is much news here besides its semi-virality in Twitter bubbles. "Small legal education start-up does awful, sexist webinar, apologises too late" doesn't seem to have much point beyond a naming and shaming, though watching all the terrible decisions and reactions unfold on Twitter and on video, certainly had a bit of an exciting 'slow motion car crash' quality to it, I imagine, which is why it was so viral.
At the end of the day, is there a wider problem of toxic masculinity in law? Yes, most probably. Is this unique to the legal profession, or is it surprising anyone that some lawyers behave in a sexist manner? Probably not. Does this LawSikho episode teach us anything or is it particularly illuminating about whether this kind of behaviour is systemic in the wider profession? *Shrug*
There’s more to be gained here than just the spectacle /vitality of it. It IS a slow motion car crash - but it also does say a lot about problems women in the law face -sexual harassment and toxic hostile environments , and also frankly about these “start-ups” that claim to be the best in legal education - even better than universities and how they are built. Legal education is moving increasingly to an online space - to not cover it because it’s run by private players just doesn’t seem to make sense.
And LI doesn’t always have a “new”/ “novel” thing to add to a story - so much of what you do is simply recording things that happen in this space - if you really did want a new angle I suppose you could interview people involved/ find out what happened behind the scenes/ have people write in with opposing view points/ any number of things.
I get it seems like it’s unfair to pick on these “small, private “ players by reporting their practices - but lawsikho claims to be a very big player, actually does have a huge audience, and if this had happened in a public meeting of any law firm- this would be on your website.
I just really don’t buy it. It’s your website and you can do as you wish - just a “ we don’t want to” should be enough - but this reasoning seems a little off tbh.
The reasoning above is genuine and practical though. It has actually been our policy for a long time to stay out of covering private commercial players, in part also because it's such a big field. Do we cover every legal ed or legal tech start-up by a lawyer? Do we cover every single time one of these does something stupid or might release tone deaf marketing materials, tweets something stupid or goes out of business or is facing financial difficulties (and I believe many of them have at one point or another)? How do we decide whether a player is big or important enough to 'warrant' coverage when they mess up or succeed? Based on how good their marketing is? Or based on how much outrage there is on Twitter? Do we cover their product launches? Do we cover every time they win a client or sign up 1000 more students?
In short, if we start covering LawSikho et al, we're looking at a huge sector and huge new beat to cover, and I don't think there is a huge amount of interest from our current audience for that really (but please correct me if I'm wrong there). In this case, I don't really feel this is a significant enough story of wider interest to warrant making an exception to our rule because 'massive Twitter outrage' plus 'spectacle' plus 'sexism = bad'.
But maybe that assessment is wrong and, you're partly right, maybe it's also a "we don't want to". It feels like there's nowhere for this story to really go from here, after apparently a few days of Twitter outrage and videos and commentaries, is there anything left unsaid in this that's not been said already (and indeed from pretty much all sides)? Despite calls to the contrary, considering the size of the company, it seems highly unlikely the CEO/co-founder will quit or be ousted (but who knows)... It's possible their business will get affected negatively by this. Or maybe all the negative publicity is actually having the opposite effect and lots of single men are flocking to them to learn law now, having heard of them for the first time. Again, who knows... But the main point may be, that I'm not sure finding out is really within LI's remit at the moment nor do I think would it be particularly interesting to our current readers... (again, please let me know if you disagree).
I don’t think covering this event means you’ll have to cover everything every two bit player in this space does - newspapers regularly report what reliance is up to and not the mom and pop shop down the road.
And as for your viewers - people have been asking - I’m a regular reader - we do think this deserves attention.
Maybe he won’t resign - that’s hardly the point though right - these people hardly ever resign- doesn’t mean we neglect reporting their misdeeds.
Now if you don’t want to- hey- you don’t want to- but then you likely won’t stop people who claim you have ulterior motives.
Also I thought of yet another angle for a story - online harassment for women during online learning due to Covid. There are just so many. Your law school beat is not going back to normal for a while - this is where that action is.
The CEO is not such a once in a lifetime genius that we need to al just put up with him.
Also this accountability is more important because they work in the education sector and have enormous influence on young people - and going by how inviting this misogynistic dude wasn’t some accident - but an action that had been discussed and planned within the company - going by how ramanauj whines about being politically correct in the video - it’s clear the organisation is not headed anywhere good with its current leadership.
Second- arguing that people don’t have locus when it’s a very public matter in public domain and the webinar was a public event is not very logical. There is tons of literature on companies being accountable not only to their shareholders but also stakeholders - i.e, society. If that wasn’t the case no ceo would ever be made to resign because of misconduct.
And next- you’ve claimed that women run companies are just as bad using a sample size of one. There’s another failing of logic.
Lastly- there is a difference between sexually harassing your employees and doing what ramanauj did - which was abusing his power to propagate sexist harmful BS. And to force a comparision between the two acts is not very logical.
I love it when men ask me to prove this kind of stuff to them - putting
all the burden on me and none on them to make any sense in the first place.
And you don’t know anything about me- I teach young people too - I know what an awesome responsibility and privilege it is. And I can see how Ramanauj has disrespected it just to - what- appeal to base instincts and get more eyeballs?
He had a responsibility to his students - he failed them. Certainly there are enough and more people in the world who can take his place.
A lot of shit goes down when women head organisations too - but I don’t think it’s this kind of planned public debauchery. No woman would call a pick up artist to talk to law students.
And ofc I can and will go elsewhere - but let me just say this - you’re telling me there’s a free market and that’s a good regulator- all those people all over social media asking this guy to go away - they also form the free market. You don’t get to run your own sexist little fiefdom in the Internet age.
Also, when you ask for due process before private actors make private decisions about whether to patronize a business (or indeed file a criminal complaint), you are expanding the due process requirement (potentially in an unnecessarily rigid manner), just like those who insist on correct spelling and punctuation in LI comments. Just like the latter makes you a grammar nazi, the former could make you a due process nazi.
The expansion is unnecessary because I don't have to follow any "due process" before filing an FIR (the most extreme suggestion in your example). It is for state actors to follow due process after that. Otherwise, you'll be arguing that witnesses can't say that an accused killed someone at trial, because he's presumed innocent till proven guilty in that trial.
Lastly, can we please stop equating being asked to resign with lynching or killing. There's enough and more evidence that these are very different things.
You don’t get to tell people how they want to process this, or how they want to press for their demands. The legal world has historically been hostile to women fighting sexism- perhaps they found an alternate route and it works for them. And guess what? It’s not illegal.
Yes I’m anonymous - as are you. I’m not doing it to hide anything- I’m just doing it so I don’t have to deal with being hounded by people on my social media. I have no connection to lawsikho or it’s ceo- none at all. I just watched the thing after it came out on twitter and was horrified on behalf of all the students who implicitly trusted this man and were let down.
If anonymity is what makes my opinion “garbage” then why are you bothering to respond? You see sense in it too no?
p.s. A big cheer to the girl who spoke up during the webinar. Well done sister.
https://twitter.com/karunanundy/status/1262089773587427328