“Four years of working with tight budgets have made in-house counsel at companies both inside and outside India acutely aware of the need to get value for money from their legal advisers. At the same time, the complexities of doing business in India demand that legal advisers should be of the highest possible caliber and that their expertise should be well attuned to the nature of the task at hand.

India benefits from a rich and diverse legal market, but while some in-house counsel and foreign law firms already make
good use of the diversity of services on offer, many others are unaware of the sheer depth and breadth of the legal market, particularly when it comes to small and mid-size Indian law firms.

With this in mind, India Business Law Journal introduces 50+ high quality law firms that prospective clients and referral
partners would do well to know about. In our April issue, we will repeat the exercise for intellectual property firms. The value of such information cannot be underestimated: after using the services of Shantanu Mohan at SMA Legal for six months, the chief sales officer of a European project management and consulting company says “we should have
called him earlier … [he] does not waffle and gets to the heart of our problems”.

The European executive chose to work with SMA Legal – a five-lawyer firm in Chandigarh – after speaking to “big law firms in Mumbai”, finding that “their rates seemed excessive” and hearing that SMA Legal “are loyal to their clients and are not afraid to challenge big players”