Hi,
Thanks for looking us up here. I want to tell you more about the firm, our culture, and the people that make up our firm. We are a sharply focused team. For about a decade now, we have been enabling entrepreneurs, product-folks and some of the world’s most cutting-edge technology companies deploy new tech products and business models. We are building a practice of the future, for the future. This is a creative business. We help create. That becomes possible because of the like-minded, passionate, and creative people who work here. And we do this for fun. We want to enjoy the process and the outcome. The word ‘fun’ even finds its way up there on our mission statement. So does ‘inclusion.’ Fun and inclusion not only define how we run the firm but also the work we do. How do we drive inclusion through our work? Our clients include a game developer that makes games for differently-abled persons, an OTT platform that makes online content for India’s hinterland, a hygiene-products company that makes cheaper sanitary pads from organic material, a museum that wants to make art accessible to persons around the globe by installing television screens with a dynamic collection of artwork. YourStory decided to call us “an alternative law firm that focuses on technology that can change the world.” ☺
We measure our success in terms of the impact we are able to drive into the world with our work. We are proud of the industries we helped open up and keep that way. For instance, we led India’s pioneering cryptocurrency exchanges in the Supreme Court to challenge India’s de facto ban on the business. This helped open up a billion-dollar business. A client kindly told Chambers and Partners “they fought the cryptocurrency battle when many stopped fighting – they are the ones who got it over the line and opened out the space.” The Economic Times in a 2018 article called us “pioneers” for our contribution to reforming India’s drones policy. Then there are the many first-to-market products that we work on. My colleagues helped deploy one of India’s first fact-checking networks (for Whatsapp) during the 2019 general elections, when fake news and misinformation was a sensitive issue. They helped a BITS-Pilani all students-team build a Hyperloop pod that was tested on the Hyperloop One test tracks in the deserts of Nevada. And brought to India the first payment products focused entirely on teenagers.
Our clients are much like us – they are entrepreneurial, they are risk-takers, they want to change the world. They can be garage-stage startups with an idea whose time has come; or the largest global technology companies whose work is creating an impact globally. They can be governments, think tanks, or industry associations that are working to bring in policy change for technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and want insights and advice. They can be in the creative industries, a media production house, an animator, an artist, or a museum - creative businesses need creative lawyers. Often, they are seemingly-crazy people. We worked with Team Indus who in 2014 believed they could send the world’s first private mission to the moon. And in 2016, we helped them sign their launch contract with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for a dedicated mission on board the PSLV. These are the clients we work with.
My partners and I, and my many colleagues who work with us now, or in the past, some who took the leap of faith to join us in our very early days, have built this firm with a lot of care and love. With our ways of work, our firm structure and culture, we want to inspire the legal industry with new ways of approaching the practice of law – ways that we have experimented with. Join us and help us do that.
Anirudh Rastogi
Founder and Managing Partner