Building the Largest Law Firm in India | Big Think

Building the Largest Law Firm in India
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Cyril Shroff describes his firm’s success and his own leadership.
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Mr Cyril Shroff:

Mr Cyril Shroff is a managing partner of Amarchand & Mangaldas & Suresh A Shroff & Co - India's largest and foremost law firm, with approximately 450 lawyers. Amarchand Mangaldas has offices at Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata and Hyderabad. With over 25 years of experience in a range of areas, including corporate laws, securities markets, banking, infrastructure and others, Mr Shroff is regarded and has been consistently rated as India's top corporate, banking and project finance lawyer by several international surveys including those conducted by International Financial Law Review (IFLR), Euromoney, Chambers Global, Asia Legal 500, Asia Law and others.

Mr Shroff has authored several publications on legal topics. He is a visiting lecturer of securities law at the Government Law College. He is a member of the advisory board of the Centre on Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry, established by the Harvard Law School, and a member of the advisory board of the National Institute of Securities Markets (NISM).

Mr Shroff is a member of the executive council of the legal practice division (LPD) of the International Bar Association (IBA) and the advisory board of the Asia-Pacific forum of the IBA. He is a member of the Media Legal Defence Initiative (MLDI) international advisory board. He is also a member of the primary markets advisory committee of the Securities and Exchange Board of India. Mr Shroff is also part of various committees of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) - the national council on corporate governance, the national committee on commodities markets, the subcommittee on financial investors, the national committee on regulatory affairs and the national committee on capital markets. He has also been a member of several governmental and other regulatory committees on law reform concerning the corporate and securities market, bankruptcy laws, commercialisation of infrastructure, etc.

Mr Shroff was admitted to the Bar in 1982 after receiving his BA and LLB degrees from the Government Law College in Mumbai. He has been a solicitor at the Bombay High Court since 1983.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How did you build your law firm?

Cyril Shroff: Well, I think the history of from goes back a long time, we are more than 90 years in existence and right till the early 90s, we are essentially a boutique shop we specialize in a few areas including financial services. We are very well reputed but and more punching way above our weight but we were small in terms of the size of the operation.

The main growth has occurred in the last 15 years. That’s been driven primarily by I think three factors. First and foremost the market group. The Indian economy really started globalizing and getting more liberal from the early 90s after the policies that the government pursued so that gave us firstly that large amount of transactional work on the basis of which you could build a large corporate firm. So the market opened up.

The second important factor was the availability of high quality employable law graduates from universities that were being set up using a slightly different model. The national law schools, which you have sort of based on management institutions, they changed the format in terms of legal education, so the availability of high quality law graduates allowed us to recruit and fuel this expansion

And the third factor, which is sort of more personal to us was a more entrepreneurial, more western oriented management culture. Our law firm is structured very similar to many western organizations. We have formal career tracks, practice groups, and we’ve tried to use best practice in terms of structuring our organization more institutionally.

Question: What kind of leader are you?

Cyril Shroff: I think I inspire trust and a lot of the young generation has believe in the vision that I have spelled out for them. I have been very open in terms of communicating what my vision for the firm as well as the vision for the Indian legal industry has been, a firm believer that India’s independent law firm sector has got enormous potential and there are a lot who believe in that vision and follow me.

Question: What challenges do global law firms face?


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