S&R Associates partner of 13 years, Uday Walia, has resigned and is due to join Platinum Partners in Delhi, we understand from reliable sources.

Walia had been at S&R since 2006, one year after the firm was founded in 2005, and specialises in corporate, M&A, private equity work and some capital markets and banking work.

The 1994 St Stephen’s College chemistry graduate completed his BA in law from Cambridge University in 1997, followed by an LLM there.

Walia then began his professional career at magic circle firm Freshfields in 1998, where he stayed for six years before returning to India.

Update 04 April 2019: He will be joined at Platinum by two associates in his team, Natasha Aggarwal and Punya Varma. Both NLU Delhi 2015 graduates, with Aggarwal having started her career at S&R, while Varma had begun his career with a training contract in London at Linklaters.

The last (and first) time S&R had lost a partner was in 2016, when Trilegal snagged S&R partner Bhakta Patnaik as its capital markets head.

S&R had hired its first lateral partners in 2017, absorbing A&M Law Offices co-founders Sanjeev Adlakha and Viral Mehta.

Post Walia’s exit, S&R will have 13 partners nationally.

We have reached out to Walia and managing partner Sandip Bhagat for comment.

We have also reached out to Platinum for comment.