Positive Day Newspaper was in conversation with Sadaf Khan from Lexicon Legal. Check out insights from the founder of Surat’s only law firm as she discusses being a female lawyer, negotiating high stakes deals and creating awareness about obscured litigation processes. She will truly make you feel like if there’s any degree worth pursuing its law.
Q. Are you a generalist or a specialist lawyer?
A. I am a specialist layer, I specialise in corporate and IP (intellectual property) laws
Q. How would you describe your typical client?
A. As such anybody can be a client… You work for the positive day newspaper, and eventually you’ll want to protect your logo/trademark/IP rights, you can have policies for which you need legal assistance, eventually you’ll have big clients and you’ll need to make retainer agreements/engager agreements yearly, and so on. Anybody in any sector, doing any business, can become my client.
Q. Could you describe a complex case to me that you were in charge of related to corporate law?
A. As we speak, I am in Mumbai, and we had a meeting with the third biggest law firm in India, and we negotiated a very big deal for our client, which involved more than 300cr. Being young lawyers, we sat down across the table with the team of that company (cannot disclose the name of the client or the law firm because of confidentiality issues). We just finished that meeting and we closed the deal for our client – just through negotiations and the understanding we had regarding that matter. It was a very huge milestone for us, negotiating a deal of more than 300 cr.
Q. How do you go about building trust/rapport with a client?
A. When any client/individual approaches us, we don’t tell them to directly choose our services, we first try and understand what business they are into. We try to analyse any legal problems they are into or may get into, and we help them based on the same. We have two kinds of models – we have a retainer model (where you can have our service monthly basis) and the second is a project-to-project model. We give our clients very honest opinions, if we feel they will need our services monthly, then only we ask them to choose a retainer model. Otherwise, if there are only 2-3 contracts that need to be chosen properly, then we ask them to take the project to the project model.
Q. What would you do if you had to take a case that goes against your values?
A. I will never take a case that goes against my values. The reason being I would never be able to do justice to the client or to that matter. If I don’t put all my heart into the case, then I feel it’s a disgrace to my profession and a disgrace to my client as well. If I don’t stand for something, then I won’t pretend to do it, even if the money is good. Money is not the priority, it’s the quality and the commitment.
Q. What would you say is the area of law that is the most interesting to you, and why?
A. The hottest selling cake in the legal industry of profession is arbitration – out-of-court settlement. Arbitration is what the government is promoting as of now since the courts are overburdened right now. To give justice to a common man, it takes almost 5-10 years, there’s no fixed timeline, and it may take more than that as well. When commercial issues get stuck, it also hampers the economy on a larger scale. Therefore, it is very necessary to resolve a commercial dispute as early as possible, and through arbitration, we can resolve it within a year. It is such a beautiful topic and a subject that if people start understanding it, India’s economy will skyrocket, literally. Like Singapore, they have accepted and are promoting arbitration. Their commercial dispute rate is negligible. We as young lawyers should also start promoting arbitration, Lexicon Legal is already trying to do that by educating people in the city. They are taught to choose arbitration over going to court every single time because the court is already overburdened with more political matters.
Q. So what’s hampering the rate of arbitration?
A. Lack of awareness and lack of understanding. Also because there is a generation gap, arbitration hasn’t evolved. When globalisation arrived in India, people started understanding that we cannot take everything to court, with the increase in transactions and different legal problems. They understood that we can sit across a table and get it done outside of court. So, at least in the tier 1 cities, arbitration is already growing, but in cities like Surat, it will take a little more time, but when it does, we will see a huge boom in the arbitration sector.
Q. What challenges did you face while opening Surat’s 1st law firm and as a female lawyer?
A. In Surat, if you tell anyone that you own a law firm, they will still think you are just a lawyer. A law firm means that we provide 360 degree solutions to your legal problems. Like if you come to me, I can give you services related to corporate law, I can give services related to civil litigation, commercial litigation, criminal litigation, to everything. We have a team for each specific area of law, that is what a law firm does. And when you say being a female lawyer, it’s a man’s world and it is also more of a man’s profession. When I enter a room, it’s only males sitting across a table. It’s a little difficult for them to accept a woman coming with so much power and authority. It’s more about the authority that the males in society are yet to accept. If I talk about challenges on a day-to-day basis, say I walk into a room with my partner. The client will shake my partner’s hand, but they will hesitate to shake my hand. It’s a very small thing, but it does make you feel restricted. It’s the small things that matter. They won’t even maintain eye contact with me. So yeah, we face those challenges but we are here to change that mindset everywhere we go.
Q. Would you, as a lawyer, suggest living trust to anyone, and does the concept of “living trust” exist in India?
A. I think people in India have started accepting it like I know people from Surat who have started doing it. I would recommend it as well, and we deal with it as well. There have been only one or two instances like that. My partner deals with it more, so he would be able to provide more insight regarding the same.
Sadaf Khan – Founder of Lexicon Legal
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