HLS in Focus

Here 2L Nilay Vora fills us in on a recent South Asian Law Students Association (SALSA) event on U.S. law firms doing business in India.

(L-R) Amit Saluja, Global Litigation Partner at Howrey LLP (DC), Tara Giunta, Corporate Partner at Paul Hastings (DC), Mohit Abraham, former Associate at Amarchand Mangaldas (Mumbai) and current LLM student at HLS.

“In a West Wing episode (back when Aaron Sorkin was doing TV), the President (Martin Sheen) asks Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) if he would rather invest in China or in India. The answer: India, English speaking and a great sense of humor.

“The current legal craze is certainly for China. But with India’s economy booming, SALSA, the South Asian Law Students Association at HLS, decided to host an event to examine how legal practice worked with large multinational corporations doing business in India.

“It turns out that there is in fact a lot of interest from international law firms. It also turns out that there is a lot of protectionist regulation in India in the legal sector. The consensus: it would be at least 5 years before the Indian legal market was fully liberalized.

“SALSA had two partners from large law firms: Tara Giunta from Paul Hastings and Amit Saluja from Howrey. Additionally, a current Harvard LLM student, Mohit Abraham, a former associate of Indian law firm Amarchand Mangaldas, provided the Indian lawyer perspective.

“The law firm partners pointed out that law firms were already working with Indian law firms on major transactional deals (and accompanying litigation issues) that might arise. For example, when Tata, India’s largest business conglomerate, buys Jaguar, the car company, tons of legal work is done on both sides of the deal. These opportunities are what law firms are interested in when discussing an India presence. The panelists advised students who are interested in this type of transnational, transactional work to develop a set of global skills that would be applicable in a global practice, not just in India.

“Other topics included how American law firms are, of course, outsourcing a variety of paralegal and business functions to India. The panelists seemed to agree that the future of the Indian legal market is up in the air, but it is certainly a growing interest for American (and British) law firms.

“In all, this is just one of many events that SALSA organizes to embrace the cultural and professional connection to South Asia shared by many Harvard Law students, JD and LLM alike.”