This interview has been published by Anshi Mudgal and The SuperLawyer Team
Your educational background is impressive, spanning from NALSAR to the University of Oxford. Could you share how your journey into law began and how it has shaped your understanding of litigation today?
That’s a rather loaded question, and I’ll try and summarise the last 11 years as best as I can.
I must confess firstly that pursuing law was by no means my profession of choice initially. Back in 2007 I’d graduated from one military institution (the Rashtriya Indian Military College, Dehradun), and was headed to another (the National Defence Academy, Khadakvasla) as an Air Force cadet; I’d always wanted to be a pilot. However, a series of injuries due to active sports prevented me from going forth with that, and left me in the lurch looking for alternatives to pursue a career in.
Thankfully, the first CLAT was held soon after, and the exam itself seemed to be a breeze, so I landed up in NALSAR (which is when my journey in law began). The institution itself is quite phenomenal – at that time NALSAR was an extremely popular law school to be in, and boasted for fantastic faculty, great infrastructure and promised exposure to the very best experiences on offer to a law student in India. Notable faculty for instance were legends of the Bar and academia such as Prof. Vepa P. Sarathi, Prof. Errabi, Prof. Amita Dhanda, Prof. Kalpana Kannabiran, Prof. Sridhar Acharyulu etc. with Dr. Ranbir Singh at the helm – these are folks who really made an impression on a student in their formative years, and their tutelage had tremendous impact on us; so that would be one of the major inputs on my journey in law, being the role model faculty we were fortunate to have at university.
As it turns out, despite not being academically gifted (so to speak), I enjoyed studying law and doing well at certain academic endeavours I pursued. I recall being quite good at research, drafting and some amount of mooting. I also was fairly diligent at studying beyond classroom teaching. These have all stood me in very good stead throughout my practice in law subsequently. I’ve realised now that each of the smaller extra-curricular academic pursuits do an immense amount in influencing ones outlook to practice later in life. Not only did I end up publishing a lot of my research, I also gained a certain amount of confidence at applying what I knew in theory.
One thing I was always clear about through my law school time was that I wanted to be a litigation lawyer; the fancy of transactional law or big law firm money did not allure me. I now know that I was under certain illusions as to the glamour of litigation life, but back then all that I (and some of my close friends) aspired to do was to grow up and argue big constitutional law matters before the constitutional courts. That moment is obviously still yet to come. We were also well aware that the life of a litigator was a long period of drudgery and low pay, an idea that did not bother me. In fact, regular encounters with senior lawyers in college and during internships only fortified our romanticism with litigation.
With that goal in mind, I had planned my time in and after law school quite meticulously. Given my inclination to taxation and fiscal laws, I had decided to keep taxation law as my mainstay and be a jack of other trades as far as commercial law was concerned. My trajectory in practice after college (which I discuss later) followed a carefully curated pattern. I’ve been a bit fortunate to have found the right mentors along the way, and also a bit unfortunate to have not gotten the breaks I wanted at the right time. For instance, I always wanted to join a proper chamber of a senior at the Bar, as opposed to litigation firms; then also, I think having worked at a hardcore filing office had significant learning to offer; but somehow these never really worked out, mostly because of timing. But the takeaway here is perhaps that there is no straightjacket formula to ending up and finding your feet in litigation.
Matriculation at Oxford and my subsequent graduation were only the icing on the cake – while the courses I pursued there were the academic highlight of my time in law, I do not however think that my practice or its trajectory would have been much different had I not gone to Oxford. I’ll address this aspect a bit later.
You hold an MSc in Taxation from Oxford, which complements your legal expertise. How has this interdisciplinary knowledge impacted your approach to complex tax litigation cases?
So to start with, in many ways it was my background in tax law that perhaps influenced how I approached these courses, more than the other way around. By the time I went to Oxford, I had already worked at Nishith Desai Associates, pursued a clerkship on the Tax and Original side of the High Court and later worked at DMD Advocates. In each of these places, I was exposed to the very best that international tax and litigation had to offer. Our training at Nishith Desai was really the building block, and the senior lawyers on the team – Shreya Rao, Rajesh Simhan and Mahesh Kumar etc. ensured that us junior folks were drilled with really solid, fundamental learning in tax law. Shreya has of course been a mentor to me ever since. Then at DMD, right from the leadership and craft of Ms. Anu Dutt, the culture at the firm and down to the kind of matters we worked on, I believe in many ways we were doing the best matters in international tax at that time. Just as an illustration, in a span of 2 years, we did a batch of 148 appeals for GE before the ITAT, PE issued in Formula 1, the Entry Tax matter before 9 Judges of the Supreme Court, and the massive tax case against NDTV in the ITAT and High Court. These all, interestingly, were hotly discussed case studies in my classes at Oxford. So it was quite visceral to be studying at the foremost University in the world, dealing with many cases I’d already worked on!
But your question is extremely pertinent in that, even despite having not preferred a career in transactional law and advisory work, I would perhaps not be half the lawyer I hoped to be, had I not done a lot of this work during my formative years. It is also something I advise a lot of youngsters about. A multi-disciplinary approach to law is of paramount importance (I cannot emphasise this enough). Not only does it make you a drastically better lawyer generally, your approach to legal strategy, the ability to advise clients on several different resources and options available, and also your understanding of the background to various disputes, all of these become much more comprehensive.
This is in many senses, also the benefit of working in a big law firm, as long as it is a cohesive set-up. The strength of having several practitioners under the same roof and being able to draw from their knowledge and expertise is a very strong foundation to work from.
But coming to Oxford a little bit, the takeaway from Oxford itself is so substantial I may not be able to articulate it well. The course I pursued, which was the M.Sc in Taxation, was started only recently by the Law Faculty, and spearheaded by Prof. Judith Freedman and Prof. Philip Baker. These, and the other faculty such as Prof. Richard Collier, Prof. Geln Loutzenheiser, etc., as any tax lawyer will tell you, are individuals who have been at the forefront of international tax law for decades now. My classmates in our small cohort of around 30 students were from every walk of life – there may have been not more than 5-6 lawyers. So our approach to each of our courses was just a fantastic mixed bag of experience and perspective. The learning curve was very steep, and the commercial underpinnings of a highly academic set of courses was my biggest takeaway from it.
To answer your specific question, an interdisciplinary approach to law, and not just tax litigation, is something that has been my strongest craft, so to speak. Firstly, I learnt that having a commercial understanding of a dispute is always crucial; this involves understanding why transactions were structured in a particular way, what the financial and fiscal motivations may have been, as also specific commercial terms agreed. What being at Oxford helped me gain a fantastic understanding of, was the State’s perspective on the imposition and enforcement of fiscal levies themselves. There is additionally the perspective of the businessman, and the finance professional who are being subject to the fiscal framework. When all of this comes together in a single classroom, filled largely with non-lawyers, finance professionals, representatives of the Revenue, etc., your takeaway ends up being very holistic. This is applicable across disciplines, and hardly to just tax litigation.
During your time studying at the University of Oxford, what key differences did you observe between the education system there and your experience at your Indian law college? How did these differences influence your approach to legal education and practice?
Despite that Oxford is perhaps the best University in the world, I’d like to answer this in a way that doesn’t reflect very badly on my time in NALSAR. The key difference really would be the amount we were expected to prep for each class, and what we brought to the table. The class at Oxford was a lot more selective, and my peers were extremely bright professionals, who were all at the forefront of what was happening in tax and finance around the world. In some sense, in a class of 25-30 odd students, we were also representing our countries and its legal systems, and that added some degree of pressure; which is very different from the pressure of an 18-23 year old pursuing an undergraduate law program. But besides that, I think the learning curve was equally steep at both places, and while the faculty at Oxford was truly world class, the faculty at NALSAR at least at my time (and earlier) was quite something.
With significant experience in international tax and cross-border disputes, what new dimensions do you believe tax law practitioners must be aware of in the rapidly globalizing business world?
Tax law is rapidly changing, and in fact I’d mark it out as an area of law that may be the most dynamic of legal disciplines. This is not a recent phenomena, but the past decade has perhaps been more vibrant than previously. As you may be aware, international tax law in India has had a very rewarding, but also a slightly tumultuous trajectory. What perhaps began with the recourse to the now infamous Mauritius route, was later subject to enormous judicial and legislative scrutiny over the years. But developments in international tax have been witnessing a rare coming together of developed and developing nations to jointly evolve a new order of international tax law. The most exciting developments in international tax is ofcourse the OECD’s efforts in the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Framework. The work on BEPS 2.0 in terms of Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 are quite significant as far as international tax is concerned. Pillar 1 applies largely to reallocate taxable income of large multinationals to market jurisdictions, i.e. where the consumers and users may be situated. This has consequences not just to the effective tax rate, but also in some sense to transfer pricing arrangements. The current rules on these are quite complex, and should be quite an exciting area to study and practice in. Pillar 2 on the other hand deals with the objective of setting down a Global Minimum Taxation of multinational enterprises, so as to abolish double non-taxation of enterprises (i.e. No taxation in the country of source or residence).
On the issue of cross-border disputes, there are some very exciting developments as well; my experience so far has mostly been in strategizing litigations in cross-border scenarios. This can be very interesting as it delves into multi-jurisdictional and multi-forum litigations, and really for deploying strategic litigations to achieve commercial/business objectives. India is a bit late to the party in the sphere of complex commercial litigations, and I feel the legal systems and judicial discourse in other jurisdictions appears to be far more evolved; but this jurisprudence is thankfully moving towards India as well, and courts/tribunals appear to be quick to catch on.
You have worked extensively in domestic and international arbitrations. What are some of the unique challenges and opportunities you see in arbitration, especially with regard to commercial and cross-border disputes?
I am not sure if “opportunities” would be the right word for it, but in the realm of commercial disputes (as including court litigation and arbitration), we do sort of specialise in strategizing and conducting multi-pronged legal proceedings across forums and jurisdictions. This has happened perchance, in the sense that one doesn’t get to pick what matters come to us; but we’ve been fortunate enough to be doing a lot of cross-border multi-forum disputes. In the cross border context in particular, we’re seeing a lot of matters in the nature of shareholder disputes; but that itself is now a very broad category of cases. In particular, these could include disputes between co-founders, founders and institutional investors, acquirers and former promoters, lenders (of convertible debt) and the firms themselves, etc. There is a lot of very interesting work happening in all these spheres.
One component of these tends to be arbitrable disputes, but in the context of tech or IP heavy firms, there are often court focused litigations on intellectual property matters. Then there may be certain recourse before the company courts/tribunals, regulatory proceedings, as well as criminal legal actions (in the genre of white collar crimes). How you deal with each of these, depending on which side of the aisle you’re on, is really quite a creative endeavor and can be very exciting. What is most important is to be steadfast about the interests of your clients, and to not get carried away with the idea of victory. There tend to be few, if not no winners, in such litigations. These may either end up being battles to mitigate damage, or even legal battles of attrition. The objectives will differ from case to case. The problem however, is that these sorts of litigations are very expensive, and therefore the client should have the wherewithal to finance these, and also the stakes should justify engaging in such expansive legal actions.
How does your approach differ when handling cross-border disputes versus domestic litigation?
Almost everything differs across these two contexts. The most important difference in approach is obviously on account of the procedural trappings that the disputes may be subject to (ie. Domestic procedural law versus institutional rules). There are drastically different considerations while strategizing court litigations (in India in particular) versus while dealing with offshore arbitrations or litigations. The factors weighing in on court litigations in India could perhaps demand its own chapter; these would tend to include considerations towards which court’s you can approach, choice of counsel, and really come down to how well you‘ve cracked the system. I use the word “cracked” in the sense of having learnt with time as to how best to approach and conduct a litigation efficiently to achieve your desired results – everything needn’t be contingent on the “merits” of your case. At the end of the day, everyone is at the mercy of the system, and depending on which end of the stick you’ve drawn, you’re either stuck playing defence or offence. Everyone knows for instance that a first movers’ advantage counts for a lot in Indian courts; this is effectively about how well you’ve managed the first legal action(s) so as to gain the initial favourable orders. Once you’ve got those, things are very difficult for the other side to get around. The system is really well suited in that sense to the initial aggressors. Things would perhaps be a bit different in arbitrations, and even there, vary between ad hoc and institutional settings.
But purely in the context of cross-border mandates, choice of law becomes a big question, as that determines the extent and limitations of your own role in the disputes. While we are increasingly doing a lot of offshore disputes, this is only where the mandate involves Indian parties or Indian law (which is rare). Working with offshore/local lawyers is always a very enriching experience with a lot of learning. That is something I look forward to a lot. I would also point out that owing to the typical scale and stakes involved in such matters, it is very difficult and rare to act as sole counsel in such matters; Big teams are very important, and so are the resources available at your disposal to conduct these litigations offshore. But very often, despite typically being an arguing counsel before Indian courts, we act more as attorneys/solicitors in cross-border and offshore work. So there are a lot of such considerations that weigh differently in a domestic versus cross-border context.
Having accumulated a wealth of experience across various legal domains, what do you believe are the key skills young legal professionals need to develop in order to succeed in litigation?
I would barely count myself as successful at this very early stage in my career; however, I think academic grounding is very important. For those who haven’t put in the effort during their law school years, or perhaps even otherwise, putting in the effort to continue learning is quite important. Lawyers, including myself, have often gotten caught up in the “practice” of law, and don’t devote enough attention to focusing on the academic exercise that underpins our practice. So that is definitely a good skill to have.
There are several skills that would be quite obvious, such as speed reading, being able to devote singular attention over hours to reading files, being able to prioritize work that needs attention etc. As and when you grow senior, the requirements of your role tend to evolve, so adapting to that change is also quite important.
I have recently started using some amount of AI for research and have seen what it can be capable of even in terms of drafting etc. That is definitely the future, and learning how to use AI is definitely a skill I would recommend developing. Most skills otherwise are picked up on the job.
Since you were a faculty member at Jindal Global Law School, what differences do you see in students of the current generation compared to students from your time? Has technology led to a lack of reading and research skills, or has it made them better prepared for the legal profession?
Let me begin by pointing out that I’m not really of a different generation, compared to law students today, so to speak. But even so, as they say, the more things change, the more they tend to remain the same. So I haven’t seen too much of a difference in the current generation versus mine, in a broad sense at least. There’s always a certain component of bright, eager to learn students, and those that are either not terribly bright or not very eager to learn. I think the quality of legal education now is definitely way ahead of what it was when we were students. So the average qualitative benchmark of students graduating from law schools today is, I think, quite good. But then there are attitudinal differences my peers and I notice in students/graduates today, which are not very complimentary. I do not want to comment on it much, but I think the willingness to really “slog it out” (so to speak) is much lower in a lot of the graduates we’re seeing today. This would vary across law schools, cities, practice areas etc. and it wouldn’t be fair to paint them all with the same brush.
What’s the one piece of advice or insight that you wish you had known earlier in your career? How can today’s young legal professionals benefit from this knowledge?
I’m very bad at lecturing, but let’s just say that if you’re front-side focused on generally being a good lawyer, the right advice will somehow reach you at the time you need it the most, and are ready for it. I’ve received good advice at various points from several of my mentors. To do justice to this question however, I should perhaps narrate some.
On the slightly funny side, very early at the Bar, one of my mentors made it a point to tell me that I was essentially a “liability” to the team, and that practice was not the same as law school. No matter what you did or achieved in college, when you’re out, you’re at the very bottom of a vast and cavernous system that is extremely demanding. So best to just put your head down, loose the chip on your shoulder, and work.
Sometime later, Justice Shakdher, in whose chamber I worked, while I was leaving, gave me the advice that as a litigation lawyer, I would never be able to choose my work, and that it would be the work that would choose me. That was an uncomfortable thing for me to digest, given that I was a meticulous planner of everything. But I now know that to be very true. He also gave the advice that we must treat our work as our god-given duty – this advice tied in with my existing belief system in many ways, so I was glad that my senior saw fit to pass this value on to me.
With such a demanding career, how do you find time to unwind, and what hobbies or activities help you maintain balance in your personal and professional life?
I’m very actively into sports. While not the most gifted athlete, I enjoy playing a lot of squash, and exert at a very high level towards it. I used to also do a lot of long distance running, but am now nursing a few injuries. I must confess that once every few days, I indulge in a game of Age of Empires on the network.
I also have a very fulfilling role as a dad to an almost 3 year old; so that keeps me occupied plenty. In my life before that, I used to read a tonne of both fiction and non-fiction books. I hope I will get back to those ways soon.
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