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U.K.'s Highest-Grossing Law Firm Clifford Chance Sees India Office by 2012
Clifford Chance LLP, the U.K.’s highest-grossing law firm, expects to have an office in India by late 2012 after the country lifts restrictions on foreign lawyers, said Stuart Popham, the firm’s senior partner.
“If I said 18 months I would probably be optimistic, if I said 2 1/2 years I would be unduly pessimistic,” Popham said in an interview in New Delhi yesterday.
India prohibits foreign lawyers from practising law or setting up offices in the country. The ban was upheld in December by the Bombay High Court in a ruling that said Ashurst LLP, Chadbourne & Parke LLP and White & Case LLP shouldn’t have been licensed by India’s central bank to open offices.
A court in the southern city of Chennai is scheduled to hear a suit Aug. 4 that seeks to expand the ban by preventing 31 foreign firms, including Clifford Chance, from sending lawyers to the country to provide clients with advice. India’s Law Minister Veerappa Moily said July 20 that the government would ask to move the case to the Supreme Court.
Foreign firms have created alliances with Indian law firms following the ban. Clifford Chance has a tie-up with AZB & Partners in India to serve companies doing Indian deals.
“Banks that are looking to expand their business in India need international law firms,” Popham said. “They will need the comfort of internationally experienced lawyers who know what kind of documents they have written in China, in Africa, in America, in Russia, which Indian lawyers don’t do.”
U.K. Delegation
Popham was part of a U.K. delegation that included 39 business leaders and Cabinet members during Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to India this week. The prime minister sought to sell Britain as a place for Indian companies to do business while asking India to create opportunities for U.K. investors.
Lalit Bhasin, chairman of the Society of Indian Law Firms that opposes the entry of foreign law firms, said before the U.K. delegation’s visit that he didn’t agree with Moily’s proposal to move the case to the top court.
“Revival of interest on the part of the government is the result of insurmountable pressures being exerted on the government by the British lobby,” Bhasin said in a July 23 statement. “Legal profession is too sacrosanct to be polluted by deep pockets of foreign governments or foreign lawyers.”
The U.K. delegation was well received, Popham said, although he didn’t expect “overnight” results.
Cameron had urged India on July 28 to reach an agreement with the European Union on free trade by the end of the year.
“The question of how well this visit will go down will be judged in six months or 12 months,” Popham said.
“If in six months’ time or 12 months’ time none of the restrictions on banking, on insurance, on legal services, on cross-border investment, if the free trade agreement with the EU hasn’t been signed, then I think there would be room to harbor doubts as to what it is going to take to pursue the Indian avowed policy of liberalization,” he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Kitty Donaldson in New Delhi at kdonaldson1@bloomberg.net; Kian Ganz in Mumbai at kganz1@bloomberg.net
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