There is a part of the Indian legal profession that rarely makes it into the conversation: the people who built the machinery around the lawyers.
For more than 25 years, Urvashi has been one of those people.
Her career has unfolded largely behind the scenes, at a time when India’s leading law firms were themselves being transformed. The modern Indian law firm was becoming bigger, more ambitious and more conscious of its place in the market. Clients were changing. Competition was becoming sharper. Reputation was beginning to matter differently. And somewhere along the way, the idea that a law firm could — and should — think about business development, relationships and reputation began to take hold.
Urvashi was part of that shift.
At AZB & Partners, she joined when the firm was still a very different proposition from the institution it would become. Over the years, she helped build the systems and thinking around business development and client relationships as the firm grew into a practice of more than 500 professionals. She worked closely with partners across practices, built its client relationship management programme and helped bring a more deliberate understanding of clients and markets into the way the firm operated.
Later, at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas, the brief became broader. She led client and market development at a firm where the question was no longer simply how to grow, but how to be seen, understood and remembered in an increasingly crowded legal market. Thought leadership, rankings, awards and media visibility became part of a larger exercise in shaping institutional reputation.
It is easy, in retrospect, to call this business development. The phrase doesn’t quite capture it.
What Urvashi has spent much of her career doing is helping law firms understand that being good at the law is only one part of building an enduring institution. The other part is knowing your clients, knowing your market and knowing what you want the world to understand about you.
That work tends to happen quietly. It rarely has a byline. But it can change the trajectory of a firm.
Away from the legal world, Urvashi has devoted considerable time to community work, including through the Baha’i community and as a Director at Wishing Well in Mumbai, an organisation that supports NGOs through fundraising and donation initiatives. Her work has also been recognised through Forbes’ Legal Powerlist, where she was featured from 2021 to 2023 among India’s leading legal management professionals.
There is something fitting about a career spent making other people and institutions more visible while remaining relatively out of the frame herself.
For more than two decades, Urvashi has been part of the story of how Indian law firms became the institutions they are today. She just wasn’t usually the person standing at the podium.
Urvashi is a contributing author for Clause.