“It feels great and rewarding to be recognised as the Lawyer of the Year 2021. For me, it is more than a personal recognition, it is an acknowledgement of our firm’s and its team’s hard work in helping our clients in achieving their business goals.”
Gyanendra Mishra, Co-Founder & Senior Managing Partner, Atharva Legal LLP
Atharva Legal LLP is a full-service law firm offering services in a wide spectrum of areas including transactional, regulatory, advisory, litigation and alternative dispute resolution services. Equipped with a team of skilled and competent professionals, the brand strives on their experience and expertise in advising and rendering professional legal services to a diverse clientele.
At the helm of Atharva Legal LLP, is Mr Gyanendra Mishra, one of the well-known litigation, employment, and labour lawyer of the country with 22 years of accumulated experience leading several domestic and international litigation proceedings for various MNCs. He is a part of the advisory panel of various industry bodies on the legal services reforms and policy influencers and with experience with south-east Asia and USA Laws, he has been recognised by the Bar of Texas, USA for promoting the legal understanding and co-operation between India and USA.
He ventured into entrepreneurship after spending considerable time at a very senior position as an in-house counsel for fortune 100 multinational companies, overseeing their legal function at the regional and global level. In 2017, Mr. Mishra, along with few young and dynamic lawyers, incorporated the Atharva Legal LLP to provide nuanced and efficient solutions to transactional, advisory, and regulatory and dispute resolution requirements under a single entity. Today, his firm specializes in various areas of law and is in process of expanding its horizon.
They are ready to navigate to newer horizons and offer the finest quality solutions in the key focus area of employment and labour laws, alternative dispute resolution [arbitration & mediation], litigation (criminal & civil), real estate sector, sports law, non-profit and NGOs, environmental law, corporate advisory, white-collar crimes, service law, family law, international Legal advisory with specific domain expertise in the USA Labour Laws.
Increased competition has led brands to walk extra miles to acquire new clients and retain the existing ones. In parallel, maintaining the critical balance between generalised and specialized legal offering is a task accompanied by the increased demands of informed clientele in digital age that requires constant innovation and evolutions.
For years, the legal industry seemed immune to disruption by technology. However, today it is increasingly going to be both an enabler and a disrupter for the legal profession. Increasing the use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) will throw significant challenges at the law firm by increasing the client’s efficiency but also open new opportunities for advanced offerings to the client.
The firm values teamwork as much as it does individual initiative and contribution. Their commitment towards client is personified in their actions as they allocate a single nodal person round the clock for the client along with attentive team at the disposal.
With a robust belief in thinking laterally and solving problems with a fresh and relevant perspective, they are also committed to providing commercially viable. They offer optimal legal solutions to its client’s legal and regulatory issues by investing considerable time and ensuring a high degree of partner involvement which distinguishes us from others.
Their superlative legal expert services are optimal legal/business advice by investing the time and resources judiciously and ensuring detailed legal research for the client’s work. Therefore, Atharva has been successful in maintaining a long-lasting relationship with the clients.
COVID-19 has demonstrated the importance of digital readiness, which allows business and life to continue as usual as much as possible during the pandemic. Building the necessary infrastructure to support a digitized world and stay current in the latest technology will be essential for any business or country to remain competitive in a post-COVID-19 world, as well as take a human-centred and inclusive approach to technology governance.
The focus is on adopting the best technology tools and services, to ensure seamless services to the clients, both in advisory and litigation space. High speed and stable internet, information security, privacy and timely tech support can be big issues and we must be fully ready to face the technical challenges to the new working environment.
“The journey to success is a different experience for each person. Success, for me, is accomplishing goals not being motivated by financial achievement only but by creating value for the client helping them in distress, passion for the law and hard work. Once your practice this, it often goes hand in hand with financial rewards as well. Passion for the work, honesty, integrity, and perseverance are some of the prerequisites to achieve the desired success in the legal profession. The habit to read, technology suaveness, constant up-skilling, is necessary to be on the top of the game,” advised Gyanendra.
The team at Atharva takes great satisfaction in their performance during the difficult times of pandemic. Not only were they able to support the existing clients in meeting the new and unexpected challenges, but being able to acquire new clients, with very diversified requirements of the legal services.
As a firm, they viewed pandemic related challenges as a larger opportunity to build on pandemic-related accomplishments and re-examine (or even reimagine) the organization’s identity, how it works, and how it grows. Looking forward, their expansion plan includes keeping the focus on re-energising to establish the law firm resolutely as one of the leading firms with a continued focus on the growing needs of our existing client and aggressively pitching to acquire the new clients. They are also in the process of expanding their geographic footprint domestically as well as internationally.
“What many leaders feared, and the pandemic confirms, is that their companies were organized for a disappearing world—an era of standardization and predictability. It has been overwritten by four big trends, a combination of heightened connectivity, lower transaction costs, unprecedented automation, and shifting demographics,” the leader shared.
He added, “I would advise the new entrant as well the established player in the legal field to keep the focus on the emerging thought process where clients long to belong, and they want to be part of something bigger than themselves. Organizations that fixate only on profits will lose ground to organizations that create a strong identity that meets employees’ needs for affiliation, social cohesion, purpose, and meaning.”
Future-ready organizations accomplish this in three ways: they get clear on their purpose; they know how they create value and why they’re unique, and they create strong and distinct cultures that help attract and retain the best people.
The service to humanity is one of Atharva’s core philosophy and Gyanendra firmly believes that the ultimate purpose of the law is to serve the society in which it operates, particularly to the disadvantaged and unprivileged section of the society, with no or very limited access to justice.
Each Atharva law firm partner is mandatorily required to spend 20 % of the collective billable hour for pro-bono services.
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