HSA Advocates partner Aniket Prasoon will start up regulatory and infrastructure disputes and projects advisory firm PLA Advocates, with his team of two.

Prasoon is a 2009 Nalsar Hyderabad graduate, who had begun his career at Trilegal before moving to HSA in 2014 as a senior associate. He made associate partner in HSA in 2016, becoming partner in 2017.

Prasoon said: “Every lawyer at some point in time wants to go independent. I think it’s the right time for me to do that.”

Clients had also been supportive, he told us, with some having promised to continue briefing him.

He is joined at PLA by two of his associates from HSA - Abhishek Kumar and Srishti Rai - and Prasoon said that the plan was to hire “a few more” fee-earners in future, but to remain year “for a year at least […] to see how the workflows come in, and depending on that, the growth strategy will be decided”.

HSA founding partner Hemant Sahai commented that he wished Prasoon all the best, who said in turn that HSA had “provided a great learning curve and working with Hemant [Sahai] was a pleasure”, giving him the confidence to start on his own and devote more of his time to arguing matters.”

PLA would be focusing primarily on contentious regulatory infrastructure matters - something Sahai himself also specialises in - as well as regulatory commercial disputes and arbitration, as well as projects advisory work.

“HSA always empowers its people to enable them to grow as professionals,” said Sahai. “One of the logical next steps in a professional’s growth is exploring one’s entrepreneurial ambitions.

“It is noteworthy that HSA encourages and enables growth of leaders as is evident from the fact that most of the partners that have moved on from HSA over the years have set up new law firms.”

Prasoon said: “Given that the energy regulatory bar is quite a small group, I am sure I will keep working alongside HSA on various matters.”