Shared value system holds a firm together: Jyoti Sagar

Jyoti Sagar, the founding partner of J. Sagar Associates has said that the whole idea of shared vision is very very important while building a law firm.

"You need to have a core ideology of some kind which means it is not only a shared vision but also a value system, values that are clear to the firm, because thats what I call the glue which holds them together."

Jyoti Sagar was part of a panel that discussed the implications of the judgment of the Bombay High Court at the 6th Annual Asian ITECHLAW Conference, held at Hotel Taj West End in Bangalore on the 4th and 5th of February, 2010. The discussion which was moderated by Nikhil Chandra from Rainmaker, also featured Lalit Bhasin from the Society of Indian Law Firms and Shweta Bharti from Hammurabi & Solomon.

"It has to be a shared vision, certainly at the partnership level of the firm, where everybody participates and says this is what we want to be, this is why we are together, we like practice of law in this environment and thats why we are together not because we belong to a family for instance but we believe in this, it is a colleaguel partnership as we understand and trying to do something institutional is very very important."

"It is not an easy task. I think the way to do this is through a proper process of feedback mechanism, whether you are talking to your associates and their appraisal process and hearing back from them about what they think. We have a revolutionary thing because our equity partners go through a 360-degree review which includes an upward review from our associates, inclusive of peer review from our partners, inclusive of client satisfaction surveys which sit on top and feed into the system and that is built into our partnership compensation mechanism," he said.

"Whats happening is the way people want to work today has changed. There are people who rather go home and work from there, work remote, work at their pace." He said that there are firms where there is a culture of everybody having to be in office till 2 in the morning whether there is work or not.

"And I say to myself, in a corporate practice, apart from a conference which you may have to take with California which is thirteen and a half hours behind you, it is different, but really, by the end of the day if you havent finished the work that you are supposed to do on your desk, then there is something really wrong with you. You are inefficient in the way you do your work."

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