Book Spotlight: Akshay Jaitly | Trilegal: The Making of a Modern Indian Law Firm

Motivation for the book

Well, in about 2022, I decided that I'd become a really boring, loyally writer and that in order to restart or rejuvenate my writing muscle, I should do something. So I wrote for 30 days, I wrote 300 word blogs on various different topics and two or three of them turned out to be about the early days of Trilegal. And I posted them on LinkedIn and they got a really good response.

So I thought, you know, why not do something more? And in fact, lots of people said we need more of these pieces. But Ajay Shah said to me, stop all of this immediately and write a proper serious book about building institutions. And so that was the sort of initial motivator.

But 2025 turns out to be 25 years of the firm. It also turns out to be a year in which we've probably become the largest firm in the country. And we've done it with a model that other people haven't followed. So it was sort of coming together of fortunate circumstances. 

The post 1991-legal economy 

We wouldn't have existed if it hadn't been for liberalisation. It was a threshold condition for our existence and for our success.

And, you know, what I talk about in the early stages of the book is how it wasn't just a question of the fact that the Indian economy was not seeing foreign investment and sophisticated deals, but there was also that lawyers had no experience of doing these as a consequence. And so when we started, it was at a time when liberalisation was just about taking hold. And the other firms, the bigger firms, more established ones in the market, they hadn't yet become really big.

So if you were to think about the largest firm in 2000, would have had 150 to 200 lawyers. Whereas today we have 1,200 lawyers. So starting today versus starting then was a very different proposition.

But it was the fact that there was a lot of work to do. There was a lot of new work, a lot of areas which no one had developed expertise in. So if a bunch of young fellows claim to have no expertise, so was everybody else.

So there was a fairly level playing field at the time. So it was really a sort of perfect storm in some ways. 

Central message of the book

The central message of the book, as I put it, there are many messages, but if there was to be just one, it's that in the India of today, a sharing model, not just a communist socialist type of sharing model, but a merit based sharing model can achieve enormous success.

Because what we did was we had one partner, one vote from the beginning. We have all our partners, equity partners. The founders today own less than 10% of the firm.

We've been capable of being chucked out of the firm for the last 15 years, etc. It's not just that there was a quaint firm that was set up with these values, but that that firm has become one of the largest in the country. So the message is really that sharing models can succeed.

And I think as someone who's a big believer in free markets, it doesn't necessarily contrast or contradict the fact that people like to collaborate. People like working together. People like the feeling of being in a team.

And I think if you can create the right set of incentives that enable people to do that, then they prefer that system on the margin to a system in which they might make a lot of money. Probably 10% of the people will go to the system that pays them the absolute most. But if you're paying well and if the rewards are good and the quality of work is good, there's public recognition, then I think 8 people out of 10 will opt for a system in which you don't go into work feeling who's going to shaft me.

Author’s reflections

This was an enormous learning experience for me. So I learned a lot of things. Now, I've never read much about organizational theory or I've not read much about what corporate gurus have said, but I did in the context of writing this book.

And what was really interesting for me to see and to some extent rewarding was that many of the choices we made and the things that we did and the way we structured ourselves and the manner in which we took decisions is sort of almost like what the playbook is. So you've got lots of people like Simon Sinek and others saying, this is how startup founders should think and this is how you should structure yourself. And we did a lot of that.

My favorite reflection on this was Rick Rubin, the record producer. And he says that, you know, rules don't form behavior. Rules can be restrictive.

So we did have rules in the beginning, but we were flexible about what the rules were. And we let the values, our values sort of take over, too. And we formed our rules around our values as we got to know each other better.

That was one, since you'd asked for two. The second was this very interesting idea of the strength of weak ties. Now, you know, some of us knew each other well in the beginning of the six founders.

Some of each didn't pretty much didn't know each other at all. But what this theory says is that when founders don't know each other that well, they're likely to be more accommodating. They're likely to listen to what the other person's viewpoint has for for its substance more than they would with their best friend, who it's very easy to say, you don't know what you're talking about.

I've known you all your life kind of thing. So this idea of founders not needing to know each other that well in it, in fact, being a positive attribute was something that it was a bit of an aha moment for me, because I can see how the way we dealt with each other in the early days was sort of this. This was seemed to have been lurking around in the background.