The deal market in Mumbai is always in full swing. It will slow down occasionally for a quarter or two. It then explodes once more. We’re seeing a significant increase in transactions through the roof, right now. Law firms are panicking. They have to have bodies to deal with the mandates that are coming their way.
Trilegal is making a big push to take this deal flow. They are aggressively expanding their Mumbai office.
In particular, the company is looking to recruit in Gautam Singh’s team. This is not a specific investigation to locate one missing associate. Across all positions they are opening up the doors. They require new people to fill in the nuts and bolts of a closing checklist.They require fresh talent to handle the sheer chaos of a closing checklist. They also require sharp, senior counsel with unerring instincts to fight back when opposing counsel is marked up aggressively, but not so aggressively as to destroy the deal.
This particular desk specializes in General Corporate, Private Mergers and Acquisitions, Private Equity, Venture Capital and Structured Finance. This is a very large portfolio. It encompasses virtually all the life cycle events a corporate client may encounter.
The Sector Agnostic Reality
Eventually most large law firms will push you to the wall. You are now the infrastructure group guy. Or you’re the tech and start-up specialist.
This team is different. It’s completely unbiased to any particular sector.
Sounds like a good idea in theory. It implies a ton of variety. It means that you’re not just looking at the same regulatory frameworks for five years in a row. You have to have extreme mental agility to require. A Tuesday may provide the opportunity to be lost in the fine print of the foreign direct investment guidelines to the legacy manufacturing firm that is attempting to sell a controlling interest. As of Thursday, you might be running diligence on a very unregulated Web3 startup backed by a very large fund, from across the globe.
You simply need to get to know a completely different line of work in a flash. You need to think through the particular commercial motivations behind a healthcare buyout, and then work out the chain of vulnerabilities for a retail brand. It is exhausting. It’s also the quickest route to being a true deadly corporate lawyer. You see everything. You get an understanding of how cash circulates throughout the economy.
Dividing up the work.
It is important to know what to expect. The team’s practice areas are extremely difficult.
Generally, private M&A is not clean. Typically, it means that it’s a promoter who has started a business from the ground up and fears losing control of it. You will end up spending hours debating what exactly constitutes a material adverse change. You will write indemnities for very particular past tax obligations discovered on page eighty of a financial audit. It’s extremely paranoid. Three years down the deal signs, it’s a must to predict all possible scenarios that may go wrong.
The tempo of the PE and VC work is very different. Venture capital financing deals are quick. A term sheet is signed and the clients want the final transaction documents completed in 3 weeks. You have cap tables that resemble a math problem. The anti-dilution provisions have to come into play. The pressure is on because the founders are usually on a cash flow deficit and have to have the money wired as soon as possible.
If you have then you have structured finance. Now we get into the nitty-gritty details. It isn’t simply a matter of simply composing a basic loan arrangement. Creating complex security structures. You are working with debenture trust deeds and escrow. If a default occurs on a payment waterfall, a single misspelled comma in a payment waterfall provision can literally cost a client millions of dollars. One needs to be obsessed with the text’s mechanics.
The meaning of Hiring Across All Levels.
Since the search is open in all bands, expectations vary wildly from vintage to vintage.
Have no choice but to accept if you apply as a junior. You are about to enter a virtual data room. You’ll spend days scanning through hundreds of poorly typed contracts, such as employment agreements and real estate leases. You will have to identify the concealed traps. The change of control provisions that might inadvertently result in a huge liability for your client on closing of the transaction need to be identified. It is a grind.
If you’re coming in at the mid level, you’re the engine of the transaction. You accept the raw diligence reports from the juniors and then work out ways to negotiate safe contracts in the Share Purchase Agreement. You absorb the corporate and legal wrangling that takes place at the middle level when each side refuses to budge on liability limits.
Senior hires have a new set of headaches. There’s the issue of managing the client’s expectations. You are the middleman between the hard charging PE partners and the overworked associates on your team. You must be able to identify the problem areas of a commercial business that no one else would catch up with and bring it to a billionaire founder’s attention in layman’s terms.
A Book of Knowledge for the Technical Rules of War.
The application process here is extremely simple. It also helps you have a quick exam of your ability to follow simple instructions.
Attorneys love to write. Theirs is one of the greatest passions: to write a lengthy cover letter detailing how excited they are for corporate jurisprudence, as well as how they’ve always dreamed of working for Trilegal. Do not do that.
Gautam Singh and Akshay Vaddagiri are the hiring partners. They have a lot of deals in play at the moment. They do NOT have the time or patience to read a 4 paragraph email about your moot court accomplishments. Their hiring spree has got a very strict limit.
Your CV should be sent directly to them. Along with the attached resume, they only want a strict two-line introduction in the body of the email. Nothing more. Cover letter not included. No flowery language.
Simply put in your current ability level. State your firm. Describe the type of deal experience that you have. It should be purely factual.
The actual email addresses are Gautam.Singh@Trilegal.com and akshay.vaddagiri@Trilegal.com.
