From Associate Editor to Corporate Lawyer – How did it happen and why did you make the shift?

I studied law to be a good quality journalist. I believe one cannot be a good journalist without a good sense of the law, the Constitution and administration. Over time I got bored of journalism, the way it was then practiced, and what newspapers and journalists were then going through made me think I should not waste my skill and education as a lawyer and should try and put it to use. I was lucky to meet Berjis Desai, now our managing partner at the time I had started developing doubts about a future exclusively with journalism. He gave me a break into law despite my unconventional background and supported me through a hard transition.  At a flippant level, I used to think that being a lawyer would give me evenings at concerts and clubs as opposed to slogging in the newsroom. I learnt after the move that the practice of law had changed, and a person like me had a place because lawyers could no longer afford to be in their clubs and concerts every evening. The shift gave me a blend of both academic work and research (akin to journalism) and a reasonable income (journalists were paid really low remuneration those days). The five years of business journalism, largely covering capital markets had given me a ringside view of securities legislation and its administration and that was very useful in applying myself to the new profession with greater clarity on legislative intent behind various regulations.
 

You are India's only complete securities lawyer. One of your client's said, “Som is an expert on corporate and litigation practice”. What according to you is more challenging and how do you manage to balance both these aspects of your practice?

The practice of law per se keeps one on one’s toes. It is one of those professions that let's you define what you want to do with it, and how you want to embrace it. Securities law has become as intensely complicated as tax laws – a number of self-contained regulations, which have to be interpreted purposively rather than technically (as one would interpret tax laws).

While most of my time is spent in transactional work, I persist with securities litigation work because it gives me a ringside view to how a bench of judges would practically view exotic interpretations that transactional lawyers tend to take for granted. No abstruse structure is worth the paper it is written on, if it would face challenges in enforcement, or if it could fall foul of compliance when interpreted by a judicial mind.

Both streams of work are challenging in different ways.  With a court, the margin for error is very narrow in some aspects – every mistake on a factual point can be given the colour of deliberate misrepresentation, and one has to tread very carefully, while in transactions one can commercially explain a mistake to the counterparty and ensure there is no presumption of bad faith. On the other hand, with commercial transactional work, the margin of error with an interpretation of law is very low because clients are deploying real money on the basis of what you say to them. Managing both is not as difficult as it can seem. Since most of the litigation work I do is in the Securities Appellate Tribunal, which runs a well-organised docket (if a matter is posted for a particular day, by and large, it would be heard on that very day) and therefore time management is possible. One cannot say the same about the high court where there is absolutely no assurance on when any given case would be heard. Therefore, I am able to pursue both related interests in parallel.

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