For most global law firms, the India practice sits in Singapore.
When the National Stock Exchange of India selected its IPO advisory panel, the international slots went to Latham & Watkins and Sidley Austin’s Singapore offices. On Blackstone’s $600 million investment in Neysa Networks, Gibson Dunn fielded its team from Singapore. On the Novartis divestment, Freshfields named its India Group co-heads as a partner in Singapore and a counsel in London, supported by associates in both cities, with not a single lawyer on the team resident in India. Across major international firms, the partners holding primary client relationships for the corridor are physically located in Singapore, operating on fly-in, fly-out routes to Mumbai and Delhi.
This geographic setup is traditionally explained as an inherited artifact of regulatory restriction. That explanation is out of date. The Bar Council of India (BCI) notified regulations permitting foreign lawyers and law firms to practice foreign law and international arbitration in India in March 2023, and re-notified a revised framework in May 2025. The Draft Advocates (Amendment) Bill introduced in July 2026 seeks to place this framework directly into statute.
Yet, global firms have not opened offices in India. They have remained in Singapore because, for most business models, staying offshore remains the rational commercial decision. The strategic issue for law firms is therefore not whether to relocate to India, but whether they have accurately priced the hidden operational costs of running an offshore corridor practice.
The Economics of Remaining Offshore
The commercial rationale for establishing a physical office in India remains thin.
While the BCI framework permits registered foreign firms to advise on foreign law and international arbitration, it strictly prohibits foreign firms from advising Indian clients on foreign law within India. This restriction removes a substantial portion of the high-margin revenue required to justify domestic overhead. When combined with onerous registration procedures, complex reciprocity constraints across jurisdictions, and unresolved cross-border tax treatment, the economics of setting up an onshore presence do not balance. Add to this the ongoing legal uncertainty regarding the BCI’s statutory authority under the Advocates Act and a cautious approach is reinforced.
A firm maintaining its India practice out of Singapore is not falling behind regulatory liberalisation; it is evaluating the market correctly.
Non-Regulatory Costs: Intelligence Dependency and Concentration Risk
A structure can be commercially rational on regulatory grounds while creating strategic vulnerabilities elsewhere. Law firm management may evaluate two specific costs:
- Intelligence Dependency on Competitors: Real-time deal intelligence such as current regulatory enforcement postures, actual clearance timelines, and specific partner bench-strength has a short half-life. An offshore practice in Singapore acquires this intelligence primarily second hand from the Indian law firms it instructs. This creates a delicate dependency: the domestic firm serves as the international firm’s source of local market intelligence while simultaneously competing against it for primary buy-side mandates.
- Key-Person Concentration Risk: In many international firms, the “India Practice” relies heavily on two or three key partners in Singapore who hold the institutional memory, local relationships, and client trust. Management committees often market India as a broad firmwide platform capability, when it is actually an individual practitioner asset. This concentration risk is frequently realised through lateral partner movements rather than market shifts.
The Regional Platform Dilemma
Where an India practice sits within a Singapore hub that also covers Southeast Asia, India is rarely a dedicated capital investment. In such cases India happens to be a competing demand on shared partner time.
This structure is financially attractive because the marginal cost of adding the India corridor to an established Singapore platform is minimal. However, commitment remains fluid for the same reason. When regional transactions in Indonesia, Vietnam, or Malaysia accelerate, partner bandwidth is allocated based on immediate billable demand rather than long-term corridor strategy. Clients often experience this shift as variable responsiveness, attributing it to capacity constraints rather than platform design.
Practice-Specific Vulnerabilities
The strategic impact of operating offshore varies significantly across practice groups:
- International Disputes (Low Risk): Offshore positioning in Singapore remains optimal. India-related international arbitrations are predominantly seated outside India, with Singapore serving as the primary seat. Dispute resolution practices sitting in Singapore are aligned with market demand.
- Foreign-Law Specialists (Low Risk): For specialized practices such as London-based cross-border tax structuring, US capital markets, or European IP, location relative to India is irrelevant. Their value depends on specialised legal expertise rather than local proximity.
- Relationship and Origination Practices (High Risk): Firms whose India desk relies primarily on relationship intermediation face direct exposure. Sitting in Singapore without a domestic footprint leaves them vulnerable to intelligence decay and key-person portability, while BCI restrictions prevent them from serving the domestic client base that would justify local expansion.
Evidence and Strategic Limits
Two analytical limits should be kept in mind when evaluating this data.
First, the staffing evidence relies on deal announcements submitted to legal media, which reflect marketing practices and may underreport support staff or overstate specific partner roles. The absence of India-resident lawyers on those lists is consistent with the known structure of these practices, but it is not absolute proof of how every matter is executed.
Second, the regulatory landscape remains in motion. While registration uptake under the BCI framework has remained limited to date, the pending statutory revisions in the Draft Advocates (Amendment) Bill could alter the entry calculus. Regulatory positioning is the single factor most likely to date this analysis, and a sudden shift in domestic enforceability, reciprocity rules, or tax treatment could alter the economics of remaining offshore.
The argument here is not that offshore practices are inherently flawed, but that operating out of Singapore carries structural dependencies that require active management.
Audits for Law Firms and In-House Teams
For law firm management committees, the core task is auditing whether India revenue represents a committed, dedicated practice or surplus capacity on a Singapore regional platform, and evaluating whether primary client relationships are anchored in the firm’s broader institution or held entirely by a few portable partners.
For General Counsel instructing from outside India, the key assessment is determining whether their international counsel in Singapore possesses independent, first-hand market visibility, or if the firm is acting as a pass-through coordinator for local advice that could be accessed directly.
Lawfinity Solutions advises international law firms on cross-border legal market positioning. If the India corridor is a live question for your firm, we would be interested in a conversation. Lawfinity works with one firm per jurisdiction. Engagements begin with a single conversation about your firm’s current position and where the corridor question is live for you. Write to Prachi Shrivastava
