This article has been written by Aditya Singh, a student Symbiosis Law School, NOIDA.

The guest for the webinar was Abir Roy who is the co-founder of Sarvada Legal and has many years of experience in working with Competition Law and he was also a partner at Lakshmikumaran & Sridharan (LKS) before. He passed out of National Law University, Jodhpur in 2007 after which he joined Nishith Desai for a couple of years doing M&A and then he shifted to competition law in the year 2010. Initially he started with corporate M&A but then he eventually gravitated towards competition law. He has experienced a full circle from drafting M&A contracts, so now he has nothing to do with corporate but mostly he is in courts handling competition law matters.

The host for the seminar was Ramanuj Mukherjee who is the CEO and Co-founder at LawSikho. He started an online business in the legal sphere with iPleaders.in and LawSikho.in, he started iPleaders way back in 2009 and it has as of now around 1 million unique readers per month and similarly he started lawsikho.in which offered courses with live classes, mentoring, hands-on trainings to law students, lawyers and other law professionals. Both these sites have grown very rapidly over the past decade and have become the leading platforms in their respective fields.

Q1. What has been your experience with Sarvada legal? 

A1. Abir always wanted to start something of his own but it was never his intention to start solo rather he was always looking for a team of like-minded people. Luckily, 3 or more people from his college who all have worked in Lakshmikumaran and Sridharan and three others all together formed the firm called Sarvada. Sarvada is actually a seven-letter acronym of seven partners, which means ‘Always’. He looks after the competition of practice, they have a general vacation team also, they have a team which specializes in International Trade, they work on a lot of matters for the WTO and the works like anti-dumping subsidiary, etc. which is handled by a different team. They also look into matters of arbitration, general litigation, but they do not have a corporate team or a transactions team but apart from this they work on everything on the civil and corporate side. One of the highlights is that they have been getting a lot of engagement in the WTO represents the Government of India and a couple of actions; they are also defending the Government of Taiwan in a WTO action.

Q2. How was your personal journey with competition law, like how did you get into it, and what helped in motivating you to continue this?

A2. Abir was always interested in market-based laws, in other branches of the law there are some kinds of precedents, some kind of standard format, etc. which is never the case with a market-based law. He was always interested in market-based laws. He read a lot about MRTP act which was the predecessor regime also, so when the competition act did come, he got very interested and started writing upon it and once it had a proper shape he approached the publishers and they were kind enough to give a youngster a chance, which became his first edition in 2009 followed by Second Edition in 2016 by Indian Publication. He has also written a book for Walter Clovers which was in 2018. According to him, as far as his journey is considered in competition law, he has spent 75% of his time focused on competition law, but as far as academic purposes are concerned, he has been doing some writing on competition law as well. He has also been fortunate enough to teach one batch of Symbiosis Law School, Noida on competition law.

Q3. Does writing a book give a boost to a lawyer’s career?

A3. He cannot pinpoint as to what helped him or not as it was a combination of many things. According to him, writing is extremely important because the quality of work that you write it actually attracts a lot of people they know that you have been in this space they may not agree with what we have said but they will know there is a view out there which is plausible, this can only be done by writing so that is one thing that he has always believed in. As far as the book is concerned whether it helped him with his business, in his opinion, it has though indirectly as while writing a book you always have to read a lot and while reading you will analyze more and more intricacies may be from an outside India perspective which will help him in dealing with clients when he discusses with clients on a one to one basis while doing his work or even otherwise it does help. In conclusion it may not be the book per se but learning while writing the book or writing an article does help. When he wrote the international Publication, it was more for practitioners though the content is the same as he’s dealing with the analysis of the same case laws but with more of a practitioner’s perspective.

Q4. What was the incentive behind the creation of Sarvada Legal?

A4. It is not something that just happened he always had an inclination to start something of his own but as he has mentioned it was always with a team and he has never believed in starting solo. According to him Law is a team game and everything is a collaboration and the reason why he believes so is, because he may have a team in the sense that he may be calling the shots but he has people who are assisting him but he does not think that it is the way to go because you need people to also as you need people who are younger to you or are at your level just to bounce off ideas as one may not know everything about other branches of law which may help with your interpretation in your law itself. Fortunately, among other people who are there three are actually from his college from whom one is his batchmate, the two others are his senior, so out of seven four are his friends from his college whom he knows very well, with one of them he had been discussing on and off to start something of his own but then as luck would have it they all were in Lakshmikumaran and Sridharan at some point of time where they all interacted and they all wanted to start something of their own and then they looked for the right opportunity and went with their gut feeling in 2018 to start Sarvada legal.

Q5. It is a difficult thing to choose partners or co-founders whom you can trust, so what can be the best approach for this?

A5. In their case it was more of a symbiotic relationship in the sense that they knew each other from the beginning after which they came together. So, though this issue generally crops up it did not happen with their firm. What they intentionally avoided was the situation of ‘eat what you kill’ moto they believed that every team is extremely important there will be some times where one team will get more work and the other team will get lesser work they will be times where one partner gets more work but the other partner does not get that much work, they have made it very clear that they will not follow the eat what you kill model, obviously the partnership stake among people is different which was decided even before they started, that was an agreement that they had. The moment it becomes the eat what you kill model then if suppose one partner gets work which has to be executed by his team and the bill says rupees hundred how much will be a portion to home it becomes a bone of contention the moment you have that there will be disagreements.

So, though they try that everyone will work together but practically does not happen at the co-founders level they have made it very clear that they will not follow the at what you kill model. They will deal with this approach at the time when there will be an outside person coming to join their firm but as of right now when there are only seven partners. It is not like that you don’t have disagreements but it is always good to have opposite points of view, that you can discuss and come up with a common denominator.

Q6. In the beginning six months what were the challenges faced by you?

A6. Administrative issues were there in the sense that things that they even did not think about for example taking a place on rent because it was pre-decided that they will not work from home and that they needed an office space. All the fixed costs were eating into their savings. Abir’s clients include a lot of Japanese clients so they wanted to go to Japan in the 2nd or 3rd month to try and introduce about the firm which they were not able to do because of cash flow issues, so everything started waiting and what happened was that once work comes in you add more resources and if you add more resources then you have to pay them, but if the cash does not comes in, then they had to do most of the work because of which they were not able to do development activities and this is a challenge that they are facing till date, that is how to come up with a perfect solution of work versus associate versus development of practice. Since Abir has taught in Symbiosis Law School Noida, therefore, the firm is infested with two groups at the top they are infested with NLU Jodhpur and at the associate level they are infested with Symbiosis, Noida. As Symbiosis Law School, Noida has this concept of work during an internship as it is also based in Noida, which they personally never had. If the juniors are in line with the vision of the firm everything equalizes at the end of the day.

Q7. When you started how did you hire and retain good lawyers?

A7. When they started their practice, they added people with whom they had worked before that is strategy one, strategy two is long term internship like they have been a lot of people who have done long term internship, and a couple of them have already joined them in a permanent role. So, at the end of the day they generally hire individuals with whom they have worked before or as a good recommendation from somebody. So, still they have not come to a stage where they had to interview somebody. If in the future the firm grows then they may deliberate upon the hiring strategy but as of now they are only hiring on good recommendations from senior advocates or an individual whose work they are aware of. As not having good quality work is not an option because they don’t have the brand name, because whatever be said about tier-1 law firms they are tier-1 for a reason and if they make one mistake the clients will still be there because these are long term relations and they are in a process of building and still are a very young firm so for them the quality of work should speak on their behalf.

Q8. With the field of Competition law filled with Tier-1 law firms, how did you weigh the market opportunities?

A8. According to him the biggest challenge that they are facing and will continue to face in the foreseeable future without any remedy. So let’s divide the competition law workforce of any law firm 55% of competition law market is actually is taking merger control approvals in the sense that if there is a big transaction you need to go to the CTA to get their approval, the other 40% of the workforce would be litigation and 5% would be advisory. So, to have 55% of the market you need to have a very strong corporate practice in your firm, all the big tier-1 firms have a huge corporate practice. But they don’t have a corporate practice being a young startup, though they have collaborated with a couple of tier-2 law firms. But till now he has done only 2-3 deals in the last two years which is very few. So, they are playing at a margin of the remaining 45%. But this also affects because since they don’t have corporate work other people will feel that only these people will know about competition law and not a young startup and this is a challenge which they knew from day one. Which is not a new challenge for him, and which they will be seeing for the foreseeable future if they do not ramp up their corporate practice.

Q9. What is the impact of COVID-19 on the competition law practice and how will things play out in the foreseeable future?

A9. COVID is something the outcome of which cannot be predicted so till October there is going to be no movement. As far as a new investigation that will happen after COVID would be regarding all these face masks and Sanitizers to analyze the price doubling-tripling in the market. The Competition Commission will definitely go after them because why did the price go up so rapidly so as for the government to put a cap on those prices. So, let the classes be over, let the work settle in. They already have existing work that they have to do but slowly and steadily there will be a new investigation but not before October.

According to him because of this COVID crisis a lot of deals which were in the pipeline have obviously been stalled but they will be revived with fresher valuations as the valuations have taken a deep dive. So, the company which is cash-rich will tend to acquire more companies. When the companies will make more acquisitions as a result there will be more merger work. The not so cash-rich companies will be eliminated or they may go to a point of no return or they will take some time to recoup to the position that they were, which will result in less competition because it will happen so only the cash-rich companies will remain in the market for the next two financial quarters. But regarding the competition law work it will definitely increase but post October.

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