When Nishant Parikh and Sridhar Gorthi were elected co-managing partners of Indian law firm Trilegal, they had grand plans for the firm’s strategic direction. What they didn’t count on, though, was that by April 2020, when their new roles took effect, they would be neck-deep in crisis management.

Trilegal became the second Indian firm to democratically elect new co-managing partners. The industry in India is made up of predominantly family-led firms, but Parikh, Trilegal’s former head of corporate, and Gorthi, a co-founding partner, were chosen by the firm’s partners to lead its operations when the two founding managing partners stepped down from the top leadership role at the end of March 2020. At that time, 55-partner Trilegal already had an elected management committee that comprised Gorthi, Parikh and the firm’s other co-founding partners, Rahul Matthan, Karan Singh and Akshay Jaitly.