Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co

The firm’s focus on diversity and inclusiveness helps our people realize their full potential, while delivering high quality work for our clients. We are an equal opportunity employer with equal pay for both genders and provide equal opportunities to people of different socio-economic backgrounds, gender, race, religion, beliefs and preferences.

We run exchange programs for our lawyers with entities in and outside India, to inculcate strong cultural ethos. The Firm has collaborated with IDIA (Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access to legal education) project. The Firm has a neutral body of assessment called “Associate Compensation and Promotion Committee (ACPC)” which evaluates all proposals put up by Partners across practice areas till the Principal Associate (PA) level. Albeit the world is making very slow progress on advancing gender equality, we are happy to highlight that at our Firm, among the top leadership, 2 out of the 5 members of the Management Board comprise women, demonstrating our commitment towards gender equality at the highest levels at the Firm. 49% of our workforce comprises women. The Firm has had crèche facilities, for over 10 years in the Delhi office, staffed with trained professionals, to support young mothers who start work post their maternity period and need to have close proximity with the child. This enables our women colleagues to balance their professional and personal commitments in an uninterrupted manner. The platform, in an informal setting, provides women business leaders to network and exchange insights and ideas that are helping them achieve continuing success. Our initiatives and planning have driven the results and our firm’s highest gender ratio, overall is a testament of our commitment to promote a fairer and diverse workplace culture. The Human Resources team plays a significant role and has taken the following tangible steps towards inclusiveness at all levels.

In order to develop and manage its talent, especially during Covid, the firm has invested heavily on technology and accelerate its efforts towards digital transformation. This is also to ensure business continuity during the pandemic and enable the lawyers to engage and service clients in a remote scenario of WFH without any disruption. The firm too several initiatives to engage with lawyers for their professional growth:

• The firm introduced one-on-one mental health sessions with an expert where necessary consultation is provided to help the team members cope with mental health concerns during the challenging times of pandemic.
• The Firm focused on thought leadership related activities, SAM-inars (an inhouse webinar platform for thought leadership and client growth and development as tangible steps for business continuity, and client relationship management.
• The management has put in a well thought, comprehensive Work from home strategy which is supported by accelerated digital transformation enabling the firm to manage a smooth working setup.
• We have invested various technology and innovation learning tools for trainings and development that contribute to a tangible increase and improvement of talent and skills in the firm. The firm has introduced tools such as AI-based Luminance’s machine learning technology to assist with due diligence, Litera, an artificial intelligence (AI) solution for document proofing, CLE-mentine learning platform and introduction of HRMS.