Delhi-based four-year-old start-up law firm Palit & Co has expanded to five partners after hiring Amit Jain, who was formerly an executive partner at Lakshmikumaran & Sridharan (LKS), as a partner in Delhi on 2 November.
Amit Jain had been promoted in 2016 to executive partner at LKS, and specialises in indirect tax work.
LKS CEO Bipin Verma commented: “We wish him the very best.”
Jain’s hire follows Shiva Nagesh joining Palit as a tax and regulatory-specialist partner in March 2020, having before that worked as associate partner at Lexport Advocates and in-house.
A brief history of a young firm
Palit & Co had been founded in 2016 by Pallav Palit, a 2013 RMLNLU Lucknow graduate, who had previously worked at Khaitan & Co for a two-and-a-half-year stint in its Delhi litigation practice.
Palit and partner Lalitendra Gulani commented about Jain’s joining that his “decades of experience and wealth of knowledge in the field of indirect taxation will immensely help the firm to strengthen the creative and quality focused services we constantly strive to deliver to our clients”.
Palit himself specialises in had started the firm as a sole proprietorship practice, dealing in general litigation and dispute resolution, particularly in IP and commercial contracts.
Four of the five partners are equity partners.
“We are trying to focus to grow with dedication and maintaining value and quality in what we are doing” and with an “emphasis on quality, which any good firm would have”, said Palit, but added that “we don’t want to expand very quickly”.
The firm’s clientele was mostly domestic Indian clients but also the Indian subsidiaries of several Japanese subsidiaries.
When he had started the firm, it had been “a very humble beginning” with two or three clients whom he could “ask for work and who would support me”, Palit recounted, activating his contacts and referrals in the industry, until it “organically just expanded”.
The firm had for around two years also began focusing on sending out updates on emerging legal issues to clients, which had been useful, he said.
Palit & Co currently had a “small office in Vasant Kunj” in Delhi, said Palit, and while there had been a plan to move into a bigger office before the pandemic hit, since then they had “picked juniors from different parts o the country” who are all working remotely now.
This would continue, Palit said, since the “remote way of functioning is working well for us” besides meeting up in courts when required, and a lot of other big law firms had also been doing well with remote work.