Trilegal’s partnership has just voted to promote two of its counsel to its all-equity lockstep partnership, according to authoritative sources.
We have reached out to Trilegal for comment.
Arnav Dayal is based in the firm’s Gurgaon office and specialises in corporate and M&A. He had joined Trilegal in 2009, directly after graduating from NLU Jodhpur.
Soumya Hariharan, based in Mumbai, had only joined Trilegal as a counsel less than a year ago with AZB & Partners competition partner Nisha Kaur Uberoi. She is a 2009 ILS Pune graduate with a 2010 LLM from the National University of Singapore.
Hariharan had begun her career at Singapore-based firm Rodyk & Davidson as a foreign lawyer in 2010, and moved to Amarchand Mangaldas, as it then was, in Mumbai in 2013, where she climbed to principal associate by 2016 at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas. In 2016, she had also moved with Uberoi’s team to AZB.
Update 27 March 2018, 14:24: According to Trilegal’s press release:
Nisha Kaur Uberoi, partner and head of the firm’s Competition Law practice, said, “Soumya’s elevation to partnership is a very welcome addition to our competition practice. It further strengthens and enhances our competition offering. Soumya is a very sound lawyer with a proven track record and I am delighted to welcome her to the partnership.”
Harsh Pais, senior partner corporate practice, said, “Having seen him grow through the ranks, I am delighted that Arnav is joining the firm’s partnership. He is an excellent corporate lawyer with a commercial mind-set and big deal experience in M&A and private equity investments. I am confident that his addition to our corporate practice will serve our clients and our firm very well in times to come.”
According to his firm profile, Dayal:
… has represented various Indian and overseas clients on a range of corporate-commercial transactions, involved in diversified businesses, including telecommunications, insurance, power generation, information and publishing, manufacturing, and general trading. Arnav has worked on acquisitions, private equity investments, investments in special economic zones, joint ventures, business transfers, entry strategies, corporate restructuring and general corporate compliance related work among other areas of the corporate practice.
Hariharan:
… specialises in all aspects of competition law and regularly advises some of India’s largest companies in their most challenging competition law matters before the Competition Commission of India and various Courts in India. Her multi-jurisdictional work experience includes working on competition law matters across India, Singapore and the ASEAN region.
Soumya has worked on some of the most complex M&A transactions in India, which have been subject to structural commitments. She regularly represents clients in cartel investigation (involving applications for leniency), abuse of dominance investigations and conducts competition compliance programs, across various sectors.
Comments
What are the chances that BJP will remove Mr. Modi and make me PM instead? Not zero i think...
Bombay too has some deserving people. Kya chakkar hai?
Yes, probably because of the lower number of partners, the initial salaries are much more but that's for a short window for another 2-3 years when other law firm partners catch up and make much more. Similarly, because of the lower number, partners will get more traction in terms of pitches for law firm rankings, IBA events, etc, and the internal respect in the firm is high - however none of these count, if the market still perceives you on the same footing as a salaried partner at the AMs, AZBs and KCOs of the world. As a client, you would get no difference while working with a young EP from Trilegal versus a salaried partner at the other biggies. Similarly, the founding partners get the same respect as a Tier 1 EP anywhere else.
Lastly, there are some Counsels (stress on "some") who are not being made partners inspite of probably having the same technical expertise as these guys, and continuing to wait year after year, simply because the "cosy equity" does not want to lose money - all the while their peer group is making partner elsewhere, and gaining confidence, as well as market respect. "Equity" is a carrot which is strung out to the insiders to hold on and keep waiting while the outside world moves on. At the end of the day, it is simply whether your current EP has enough goodwill inside the firm, and has a business case to push your case.
Paragraph 3: People who would have made salaried partner elsewhere are stuck at counsel because this is an all-equity partnership and partners don't want to share the equity.
You must be an AM partner, what with the clearly contradictory advice
I mean, noone is suggesting that Dayal and Soumya would have made equity at an AZB or AM this year (so NKU moving to Trilegal definitely paid off for someone), but an all equity partnership does make it more difficult to make partner at all, so they will be better than some salaried partners at the AZB/AMs? And, because they are part of an all equity partnership and aren't carrying the weight of lower quality salaried partners that their high quality contemporaries at AZB/AMs would, they make more money (but then, that's true of people at Trilegal over people at AM/AZB, etc., anyway).
And really, they'll make more money, they'll get more opportunities to pitch to clients and showcase themselves, and they'll get to work on more matters with less supervision (as there are less partners around), and this won't reflect in the quality of their work and/or how clients perceive them? Sure.