BackJ Sagar Associates elects two women attorneys as joint managing partners
Dina Wadia and Shivpriya Nanda will take over from single managing partner from 1 January
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National law firm J Sagar Associates (JSA) has elected Mumbai-based partner Dina Wadia and Gurgaon-based partner Shivpriya Nanda as the firm’s future joint managing partners.
The appointment of two women to a large law firm’s top jobs is rare, if not unprecedented in a profession globally still dominated by men.
From 1 January, Wadia and Nanda will take over from single managing partner Berjis Desai, who will become senior partner.
Desai commented in a message, “Our founder Jyoti Sagar and I are delighted that these highly capable ladies were elected unopposed as our new joint managing partners. In a non-ownership firm like JSA this is surely an honourable first."
“JSA continues to walk the talk," he added.
Desai is due to retire on 31 March 2017. The contest for the joint managing partner position was between seven new executive committee members (Amit Kapur, Amitabh Kumar, Murali Ananthasivan, Somasekhar Sundaresan, Venkatesh R Prasad and Wadia and Nanda).
However, as predicted by Desai in July, there was a “good possibility" that there wouldn’t be an election at all as only two candidates would emerge via an informal consensus.
In the US, only 4% of top 200 law firms had a female managing partner in 2012.
In Singapore, not a single women had headed a law firm until 2010 when Rachel Eng became managing partner of WongPartnership, as reported by Mint last year.
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