This article has been written by Aditya Singh, a student of Symbiosis Law School, NOIDA.
The host for the webinar was Ramanuj Mukherjee who is a pass out from West Bengal National Law University of Juridical Sciences in 2011. During college, he started with iPleaders and continued to develop it for about 9 years and currently iPleaders is counted as one of the world largest legal blogs. He is also the CEO of LawSikho which he started in 2017 and is working with his team to make legal education more accessible to students.
The guest for this webinar was Anirudh Krishnan who is the founding partner at AK Law Chambers. He is primarily into commercial disputes and arbitration. He graduated from NALSAR in 2008, thereafter he joined Clifford Chance on a training contract for 2 years. As soon as he finished his training contract, he did his BCL from Oxford. He came back to India and then joined Senior Counsel, Mr. Murari, for about a year and a half, after which he started his own practice. According to him, the journey has been good so far, he has faced certain high-pressure points and obstacles but they have taken him a few steps in the right direction.
Table of Contents
Q1. What is the reason for your early success?
A1. According to him, he has reached some success by trying to find out of the box solutions to a problem and the second aspect to it is when it comes to detailed arbitration for instance when looking at the infrastructure dispute. It requires a careful study of 30 to 40 volumes of documents and ultimately simplifying it because if you want to read to an arbitrator, 30-40 volumes, it is going to be physically impossible, therefore you need to take out from it what is critical and present it in a manner which is simple for the arbitrator to understand, where they have done a reasonably good job. Whether it is in arbitration or in court and you look at a complex construction matter and if you are able to break it into 40 cases of one volume each then you are making it as much simpler so that is something according to him that is very crucial to success. In addition to this, he generally believes in doing his own advocacy, but in 90 to 95% of the cases he would argue himself and when you spend that amount of time preparing the brief when you have driven the strategy, that also makes a difference, in his opinion.
Q2. What was your vision in the start and how has your organization evolved since 2013?
A2. The organization has evolved in somewhat an Ad Hoc manner. The two things that started the journey was that he loves the law and he loves arguing. He cannot claim that he is a very good administrator as there are some aspects of administration in which he is lacking. When starting, he was of a view to grow the firm in such a manner where he could get a lot of opportunities to argue as well. Then as things started building, they started developing a lot of work, they started getting some heavy arbitration work, which required a kind of structuring within the team. Subsequently, they followed the policy of hiring a little more than necessary. This resulted in a division of teams where they had some people who either never come to court or rarely come to court and would work only on arbitration and others who would primarily work on court cases and till 4-5 years ago they were purely a litigation and arbitration firm. The term firm could also not be used as traditionally most firms believe in the solicitors model. Where you draft and brief a senior counsel, this is more of the nature of a counsel practice, but they do their filings because in Madras they don’t have this traditional division like in Bombay where you have only solicitors or people who only act as counsel.
It is a dual practice system, in Madras one also does a filing but it is largely more counsel practice-driven than solicitor driven, and that model is continued. They have expanded along the way by adding both corporate transactional and real estate. But these were not pre-planned or thought of in the beginning and even at this point he does not really think of his firm as a national player, in the sense not becoming an all India full-service law firm. He is happy to take briefs from all India but does that by having counsels on record to file over there and going and appearing in various High Courts and the Supreme Court. So he is ready to do this as a pan India counsel model but he does not see AK Law Chambers ever becoming a pan India full-service law firm.
Q3. Are you building a team on the corporate side as well?
A3. There are other partners who handle that, the real estate part is handled by his mother, Radhika Krishnan, and corporate is presented by his wife, Goda Raghavan, and they have a Bangalore based partner, Nischal Dev BR who takes care of the work in Bangalore and they all have their own teams. His team consists of about 13-14 people. He handles a lot of court work as well, according to him maybe about 60% work is court work and 40% would be arbitration.
Q4. How do you see yourself positioned in the whole market?
A4. He does not see any competition from any solicitor firm because they have a very strict policy where when they work with another firm and the client approaches them directly they will not take the case so in that sense there is a great scope of collaboration with other law firms as well, where they may handle drafting or sometimes they approach him for settling the draft and later on arguing. In his opinion, this works well because it is not a pure counsel practice but a hybrid practice because the Madras market is that way. In the Madras market, a lot of people file and then engage a senior whereas some people file and argue, therefore it’s more of a market-driven structure.
Q5. How has your experience at Clifford Chance impacted your practice?
A5. There are about two to three very important takeaways from working in a leading foreign firm like Clifford Chance, the first is the impetus given to drafting so every line that you write is very carefully scrutinized to ensure that any extra words are cut off and changes are made by hand and one is made to write the whole thing again so, 3-4 months into that, you automatically start developing the style where your writing is a lot more precise. The second is the general professionalism and client handling. So if there is a deadline, irrespective of whether meeting the deadline is going to have a larger impact on the case, one has to meet the deadline. That discipline is important because today a lot of people are going to base their work on what you do.
So, if you say that a draft has to be sent out by 5 p.m. it has to be sent by then, this kind of professionalism was imbibed by him during his period with Clifford Chance. The third aspect where he thinks his training with Clifford and Chance helped was how to handle a large case file. So, when he was part of the arbitration team there, they were working on an infrastructure arbitration inter key where there were about 80 volumes of documents, there was no pressure then because here they handle 30 cases at the time and there, they handled 2. But those two if handled properly, one gets to know how to get over the volumes because initially when one is given 80 volumes and is told to read if one does not know where to start and where to end. Here the training at Clifford Chance really helped because they were very methodical in their approach. They had dates and events global wise and issue wise, they had a very good structuring of the whole thing.
Q6. What was your approach in comparison to other lawyers which helped you to start and grow as a young lawyer?
A6. The one thing that really helped him when he started was writing, so he had written a book on the law of reservations when he was in college. After which, he got the opportunity to edit Bachawat’s Law of Arbitration, one of the leading commentaries in India on arbitration. So, by the time he had come back, Bachawat’s edition was out and he also used to periodically write articles both in newspapers and on platforms like Bar and Bench in addition to Journals. In his opinion, all this writing helped get visibility and because of this visibility it got him opportunities to speak at multiple conferences and this also provides one an opportunity of showing to the audience that you have a different style or thought process or approach towards the problem. In addition to this, he had a lot of family support which gives one an initial head start, as his father is a senior counsel and his mother being a practicing lawyer and his father-in-law being a Senior counsel. It also helps give an opening to clients, not that those clients will stick with you beyond that one case, if you are not able to make that impact. But it does get you a head start of about 3 to 4 years which greatly helps.
Q7. How do you manage your continuous learning and development along with the pressure of cases?
A7. It is a very important aspect as the pressure is unrelenting and this is the first long break that they have got in the past 7 to 8 years. For this, he has a board where he sets out internal deadlines and he does a work allocation as to which member of the team will have to complete that work to discuss with him. Then they have further sub-delegation amongst the group because they now have a very seasoned group and a very able set of juniors who are able to prepare very good drafts. They also try to identify the cases coming up next or two weeks thereafter well in advance. They discuss the crucial propositions of the law that they need to complete. In addition to this he likes preparing individual argument notes so if you are giving a case with four propositions, break it down into those 4 propositions and give one sheet each where you set out the proposition, set out the crucial facts in that sheet to show how that proposition of law is attracted. All of this is done in advance and according to the timeline set, which, of course, means working late hours. As far as arbitration is concerned these require lengthy sittings with the clients and with experts, in such a case he, well in advance, blocks off some dates, where a full day will be only spent on preparation.
Q8. What is your approach towards hiring, retaining, and training your juniors?
A8. He prefers hiring freshers and 95% of hires have been freshers because when you have a methodology that you want people to follow, it becomes very difficult if they have been following something very different, which is why they hire freshers and then they train them in-house. Initially he used to spend time with each of the juniors trying to get them to prepare at every stage, starting from preparing a chronology, preparing dates and events, then preparing a draft. A lot of crucial training is also there when it comes to these crucial arbitrations where there are no shortcuts and one has to sit down with the juniors and have to train them till they get to a particular stage, once you get two of them to that particular stage then you get others to work with them and they will automatically get there. So now there are specific people with specific roles; he has a dedicated arbitration team. There are two or three people who have worked extensively with him on multiple kinds of arbitration cases and now know exactly how to guide the freshers. He has a similar structure for the litigation team. To retain the good lawyers, you need to identify your core team and then you provide good support to them and show them the long term opportunity that is there. You show them where they have got to as compared to where they might have been had they not joined here and hopefully some portion of the people that you spent time training would have the loyalty factor. If people may look at the opportunity rather than just the money then they may stick on.
Q9. As a law firm and a lawyer what will be your next milestone?
A9. He has never set any financial targets; he has just been doing what he loves doing. He does not have a vision for 5 years and wants to just keep building upon this. In his opinion as long as one has a passion to win a particular case independent of the stakes and of anything else, it keeps you going. Furthermore, this is a stage where he is looking to consolidate a little more on building a counsel practice and be a little more active in the Supreme Court.
Q10. What can be the possible impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the arbitration and the litigation market in the near future?
A10. As far as arbitration and dispute generally are concerned there is always going to be a market for it. If the market and economic situation is good, there will be more transactions and hence more disputes. If the economic situation is bad, there will be more defaults and hence more disputes. According to him the number of disputes may not come down but obviously, in the short-term, there is a crisis and that crisis is definitely going to impact the functioning of courts and arbitration tribunals. In the case of the medium term, there will be a number of disputes but at this point, people are looking more at advisory work and looking for ways to mitigate their losses. In his opinion, litigation and arbitration are evergreen fields. The nature of litigation and arbitration may change but the core will remain the same, therefore it is a great field for people to look into. According to him he does not see any firm hiring in the immediate future but 7-8 months down the line things would surely change.
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