Mumbai’s Advaya Legal, as well as Delhi’s Canpisce & Co, Verus Advocates and Fox Mandal & Co  have won the mandate to advise on Calcutta work. Avaya founding partner Ramesh Vaidyanathan will handle the CCI’s Mumbai work, while Verus founders Krishnayan Sen and Rishad Chowdhary will take care of CCI matters in Delhi.

Fox Mandal & Co senior associates Swati Sinha and Vijay Kumar won the Kolkata panel place, while KNG Partners and Lexus Partners will be the CCI’s law firms in Nagpur and Kerala respectively.

Double-edged

A lawyer at one of the appointed firms admitted to the Legally India web site that the appointment was a double-edged sword: ‘It’s kind of a trade off; you take a calculated risk. Purely on the transaction side you would not be able to advise [some clients or on some deals]. If you do advise and it does attract CCI attention and it falls into a litigation scenario [you’d end up in a conflict].’

Big firms with established competition practices would not have been able to win a panel place because they were already advising clients against the CCI, said the lawyer.

But for the smaller firms the three-year panel stint was an ‘exciting opportunity’ to advise and represent the CCI on ‘very complex’ matters and issues against larger firms.

Business enterprises

Elsewhere, the Ontario Securities Commission has appointed three private law firm lawyers to its Exempt Market Advisory Committee (EMAC).

The Financial Post reports that Andrea Johnson of Fraser Milner Casgrain, Michael Smith of Kaye Scholer and Julia Dublin will advise the OSC on regulatory approaches to the capital raising segment of the exempt market.

According to the OSC web site, the ad hoc EMAC informs staff on possible regulatory approaches and on potential new capital raising prospectus exemptions for business enterprises that could be introduced.