THE LEGAL MAESTRO
Vivek Chandy has over 30 years of experience in areas of private equity, mergers and acquisitions, corporate commercial work and real estate advisory in India. He also advises on international commercial arbitrations and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (CIArb). When Vivek Chandy entered the profession, real estate industry did not work with large firms and it was gradually they started appreciating, that for complicated documents and for structuring high value transactions, it was important to use large firms where partners had various specialisations. Reminiscing about his journey Vivek stated, “Initially I considered the biggest challenge was,not having a godfather. Most of the successfulpractitioners had family in the profession and thispresented itself with an easy way to succeed. Ihowever found that one cannot keep a good mandown and that hard work and common sense iswhat is needed to succeed in the legal profession.Another challenge in spite of knowing several lan-guages was proficiency in the local language tothe level of reading and understanding the titledocuments written in older style of the language.I resolved this by having colleagues with expertisein each of the local languages. Third challenge wasthe requirement to specialize, which I addressedby specialising in a few sectors with real estate be-ing one of the chosen sectors. Today it is absolute-ly necessary to specialise and the days of being ageneralist are long gone.” According to Vivek his important achieve-ments would be of being recognized within thefirm and outside as a highly rated lawyer by thelikes of Chambers where he is ranked in Band 1,persuading organizations that did not work withlarge law firms to move from small local practic-es and to understand the merit in working withspecialists and lastly managing to maintain awork life balance and health. Vivek Chandy is consistently recognised as a leading lawyer for Corporate/M&A, Private Equity, Real Estate, and Investment Funds by several prominent global legal directories. He plans to retire before the age of 65, so the youngsters in the firm can take over his practice and hopes to work on pro bono matters and give something back to society and the profession.