In Conversation with Dr. Mohit Singhvi
Founder and Head of Singhvi & Co.
Before the Firm: The Institutions and Mentors Behind a 2015 Beginning
For Dr. Mohit Singhvi, the idea of building a law firm emerged from observing how demanding legal work actually gets done. As a law student, he interned at multidimensional firms including Khaitan & Co., Singhania & Partners, Fox Mandal and Nishith Desai Associates. What stayed with him was not simply the complexity of their mandates. It was the alignment of professionals who sustained their commitment through demanding hours. Those experiences established a principle that would later inform his own leadership: exceptional work depends on the collective performance of a team.
His early professional development brought together two distinct environments. Corporate practice at Vaish Associates in Mumbai exposed him to institutional ways of approaching commercial matters. Working under Senior Advocate, the late Shri M. R. Singhvi, at the Rajasthan High Court added the perspective of an advocate's practice. Rather than treating these experiences as separate career tracks, Singhvi came to see their compatibility. Institutional expertise could coexist with the responsiveness and flexibility of a smaller practice, without either needing to surrender its strengths.
“extraordinary legal work is always the product of an aligned, high-performing team.”
That understanding led him to establish Singhvi & Co. in 2015. His stated ambition was to bridge top-tier institutional expertise with the agility of a boutique practice. The founding proposition was therefore not simply independence. It was a particular way of delivering legal services, one in which the discipline associated with larger institutions could support attentive, adaptable advice. The firm began as an attempt to bring these professional habits into the same working structure.
Singhvi also places continuing mentorship at the centre of his development. He credits Senior Advocate Shri Ravi Bhansali, alongside Advocates Shri Ramit Mehta and Shri Sudhir Saruparia, with guidance and encouragement that strengthened his grit and perseverance. Their influence, in his account, helped him evolve both as an advocate and as a person. The resulting origin story is less about a solitary founder than about knowledge carried forward: lessons from firms, chambers and senior practitioners translated into the culture of a new practice.
When Asset Vetting Became REIT-Scale and Cross-Border Work
The milestones Singhvi identifies in the firm's development reveal a widening scale of responsibility. In real estate, the progression was from individual asset vetting to extensive title clearances and the structuring of due diligence for institutional frameworks such as Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs. This shift matters because it changes the context in which a title opinion operates. The property is no longer considered only as an isolated asset; its legal position must also be understood within the requirements of a larger investment structure.
A parallel expansion occurred in corporate work. Singhvi describes mandates involving complex corporate restructuring, service as transaction counsel for corporate demergers, and advice to SEBI-registered Venture Capital Funds on domestic and international investment structuring. Together, these assignments illustrate the firm's movement across asset-level scrutiny, organisational change and investment architecture. They also explain why he resists treating real estate and corporate advisory as disconnected specialties: a transaction's commercial purpose can require several forms of legal analysis at once.
Another defining assignment was structuring what Singhvi describes as NHAI's first-ever international infrastructure project, involving India and Myanmar, alongside key consortia. He regards the mandate as important to the firm's evolution from a regional practice towards nationally recognised counsel. The significance, in his telling, lay not merely in the project's geography but in the legal coordination it required. Agreements had to remain robust despite the possibility of changing regulatory conditions across borders.
Within that challenge were specific contractual priorities: project execution, resource allocation and dispute resolution needed careful alignment for the successful bidding entities involved. These are not interchangeable drafting concerns. Each bears on how a project can proceed when commercial expectations meet regulatory or operational difficulty. The larger the mandate, the more consequential the relationship between its clauses becomes. Singhvi's account of these milestones consequently returns to a consistent theme: growth means taking responsibility for the connections within a transaction, not simply increasing its size.
RERA and the Move from Deed Drafting to Project Strategy
Singhvi reads the transformation of Indian real estate through the combined influence of RERA, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code and tightening Benami laws. In his assessment, these changes have pushed the sector away from a speculative ecosystem towards a more institutionalised and transparent market. His description is a practitioner's reading of the direction of reform, rather than a claim that transaction risk has disappeared. The essential change, as he sees it, is that legal preparedness has become much harder to separate from commercial decision-making.
He characterises the older “buyer beware” approach as giving way to stronger expectations of compliance readiness, rigorous title due diligence and structural accountability. For developers, this means that legal work cannot sensibly be postponed until a transaction is nearly complete. Escrow mechanisms and strict timelines under RERA, he notes, demand disciplined allocation of capital. Decisions about documentation, project obligations and available funding must therefore be considered together, rather than addressed as unrelated tasks assigned to different stages of development.
Due Diligence as a Commercial Foundation
In Singhvi's approach, legal due diligence informs project valuation, bankability and risk assessment. Its purpose extends beyond completing a checklist before execution.
For lawyers, the consequence is a change in professional role. Singhvi describes a movement from reactive problem-solving to proactive strategic advice. Drafting a deed remains necessary, but it is not the full assignment. Advice must also address project viability, risk insulation and corporate governance. A title issue or structural concern is relevant not only because it might generate a dispute, but because it can affect whether the proposed commercial arrangement is sound enough to proceed on its intended terms.
He therefore regards due diligence as a foundational document that helps determine a project's commercial valuation and bankability. The practical aim is twofold: supporting timely delivery and reducing the litigation that can arise during a project's development and through completion. This is not a promise that careful advice eliminates disputes. It is a statement about where preventive legal work belongs. In Singhvi's model, it sits close to the beginning of project planning, where identified risks can still influence structure, documentation and the allocation of responsibility.
One Transaction, Several Legal Languages
The range of Singhvi's practice reflects his view that a modern commercial transaction rarely belongs to a single legal category. Real estate, corporate law, banking, venture capital and investment advisory intersect because the underlying business decisions intersect. An asset may support financing; financing may enable an investment strategy; that strategy may introduce regulatory and governance obligations. Looking at only one component risks missing the consequences that travel into another. His preferred approach is to understand the whole arrangement before settling its individual legal parts.
From Title Quality to Enforceable Debt
A clear example is the relationship between asset titles and banking compliance. Singhvi explains that an informed understanding of title can help expedite banking requirements and support the structuring of clean, enforceable debt instruments. The connection is practical rather than merely thematic. The legal quality of an underlying asset matters to the terms on which a financial arrangement can be documented. Treating the title investigation and the financing documents as entirely separate exercises would overlook that relationship.
Real estate diligence: Establishing the legal position of assets relevant to a proposed transaction.
Banking documentation: Connecting asset understanding with compliance and enforceable debt arrangements.
Corporate structuring: Considering how a transaction fits within the client's organisational framework.
Investment advisory: Testing investment decisions against regulatory and asset-management implications.
Documentation That Anticipates Friction
Precision in documentation is another point of connection. Singhvi places particular value on legal documents prepared with precision and integrity, both to reduce the likelihood of litigation and to sustain client trust. The aim is not elaborate language for its own sake. It is consistency between the commercial objective, the obligations being recorded and the regulatory conditions within which those obligations must operate. A document is useful when it serves the transaction without obscuring its risks.
He describes the firm's integrated offering as a single-window solution. Its intended benefit is the removal of friction for clients who would otherwise have to reconcile competing strands of advice themselves. A strategy adopted during an investment round, for example, should not inadvertently produce a liability in compliance or asset management. That concern provides a unifying logic for his broad practice: the measure of sound advice is not only whether each component works in isolation, but whether the components remain compatible when the transaction is considered as a whole.
The Start-Up Risk That Begins Before the Funding Round
For founders, Singhvi's central warning concerns timing. Too many entrepreneurs, in his experience advising investment funds and private entities, regard legal infrastructure as a reactionary cost rather than a foundational asset. They defer compliance or formal documentation until an institutional funding round approaches. By then, however, the business may already depend on arrangements that were never properly recorded or tested. The issue is not simply whether documents can eventually be produced, but whether they accurately and lawfully support the relationships already created.
He identifies informal equity arrangements and flawed founding documents as a major source of vulnerability. Clear, legally binding provisions on equity vesting, intellectual property assignment and exit strategies should be addressed in the initial Founders' Agreement. These are subjects that determine how participation in the enterprise is understood. Leaving them unresolved can make later structuring more difficult, particularly when a new investor expects the company's ownership and rights to be readily identifiable.
Founding arrangements: Record equity vesting, intellectual property assignment and exit terms in legally binding documentation.
Regulatory pathways: Address applicable FEMA and SEBI requirements rather than postponing compliance until fundraising.
Employment relationships: Review employee arrangements, termination frameworks and contract clauses for legal alignment.
The other recurring risks are regulatory compliance oversight, particularly in relation to FEMA and SEBI, and weaknesses in employee arrangements. Singhvi cautions that unvetted contractual clauses and poorly aligned termination frameworks can expose directors to substantial liabilities later. His advice links these subjects rather than treating employment as peripheral to investment readiness. A company's legal condition includes the way it engages its people, the obligations it has accepted and the regulatory basis on which it receives or structures investment.
The response he advocates is corporate hygiene from day one: clean structuring, safeguarded intellectual property and early attention to relevant regulatory requirements. Investment readiness, in this view, is a continuing condition rather than a last-minute exercise. Founders who maintain it are better positioned to pursue capital without first confronting avoidable structural disruption. The larger point is consistent with his real estate advice: preventive legal work has the greatest value when it can still shape a business decision, rather than merely document or repair one already made.
A Commercial Answer Without an Ethical Shortcut
Singhvi's account of client service begins with an acknowledgement that businesses seek commercial outcomes, not abstract recitations of law. A lawyer must understand what the client is trying to achieve and explain what can realistically be done. Yet he draws a firm distinction between commercially useful advice and a shortcut that ignores a regulatory requirement or ethical boundary. The latter may appear to solve an immediate problem while leaving the client exposed to a dispute that has merely been postponed.
“an aggressive shortcut that overlooks an ethical boundary or a regulatory requirement is simply a deferred litigation liability.”
At Singhvi & Co., he describes the balancing process as proactive risk-mapping and collaborative problem-solving. The objective is to identify the obstacle accurately before deciding what it means for the proposed transaction. Where a structure encounters difficulties under corporate or land revenue law, a bare refusal is not necessarily the end of the advisory task. The lawyer should examine whether a compliant alternative can achieve the same underlying business purpose without carrying forward the original defect.
Understand the objective: Identify the commercial result the client is seeking.
Map the constraint: Examine the regulatory and legal difficulty in the proposed route.
Develop lawful alternatives: Use cross-practice knowledge to assess another workable structure.
Preserve ethical clarity: Keep commercial momentum from becoming a reason to disregard professional obligations.
This is where his cross-disciplinary practice becomes more than a range of service offerings. Knowledge across related fields can create room for a different solution when the first structure fails. He sees ethical clarity as protective of the client's market reputation, not simply of the lawyer's professional position. The commercial and ethical dimensions are therefore connected: a transaction that creates avoidable regulatory exposure can undermine the very business objective it was designed to serve.
There remains an important limit to the search for alternatives. Singhvi's advice to practitioners includes the willingness to tell a client “no” when there are no chances of success. Practicality does not require optimism unsupported by the merits. Useful counsel can involve redirecting a transaction, but it can also require refusing to encourage one. His model of the business-minded lawyer is consequently neither an obstacle to every difficult deal nor an unquestioning facilitator. It is an adviser prepared to distinguish a solvable problem from an untenable proposition.
The Classroom, the Research Desk and the Courtroom
Academic engagement is not a separate identity that Singhvi sets aside when practising law. He regards academia and active practice as complementary. Serving as a Visiting Faculty member at JNV University, Jodhpur, and the ICSI Jodhpur Chapter requires him to remain attentive to evolving frameworks, amendments and precedents. Teaching, in that sense, places a continuing demand on the teacher's preparation. The legal position must be understood well enough to explain, question and apply it, rather than merely recalled when a particular brief arrives.
Scholarship with a Practical Destination
He connects this theoretical engagement directly to practical tasks, from drafting a complex joint venture agreement to preparing an argument for an NCLT or High Court matter. The connection is not that scholarship supplies an automatic answer. It is that close engagement with legal developments improves the foundations on which advice and argument are built. For Singhvi, academic work helps keep both his presentation and the firm's advisory approach responsive to changes in the law.
Formal academic achievement: His qualifications include a Ph.D. in law and a Gold Medal in his LL.M.
Editorial experience: He served as chief editor of MSRJL during his college years.
Continuing teaching: His visiting faculty roles connect sustained study with professional engagement.
Those commitments also shape his expectations of colleagues. He describes deep legal research as non-negotiable, whether the subject is evolving IBC thresholds or the intricacies of international arbitration seating. The examples are revealing because they cover different kinds of legal problems. One concerns an evolving statutory framework; the other requires precision in understanding the legal architecture of dispute resolution. Neither can be approached responsibly through a general impression of the subject or an untested assumption about settled practice.
Research, in this account, is an operating discipline rather than an academic ornament. It underpins the firm's ability to advise across transactions and disputes without treating breadth as a substitute for depth. Singhvi's own academic record helps explain the emphasis, but his argument extends beyond credentials. Reading, analysing and testing legal propositions are continuing professional obligations. The classroom and the research desk matter because their habits travel into the document, the conference and the courtroom, where the consequences of incomplete understanding become concrete.
Direct Ownership Instead of Layers of Hierarchy
The culture Singhvi describes at his firm rests on institutional discipline, academic rigour and a commitment to people. These are connected principles in his account. Discipline provides standards; research gives those standards intellectual substance; mentorship helps people learn how to meet them. His experience as a visiting faculty member and his earlier editorial work inform the belief that a law firm should operate as a centre of continuous learning. Growth, on that view, involves developing professional judgment within the team as well as expanding the work entrusted to it.
He rejects rigid, multilayered hierarchies in favour of giving associates and interns direct accountability over their matters. The work he identifies ranges from title due diligence to high-stakes litigation before the High Court or tribunals. His reasoning is that personal ownership changes the quality of attention brought to a client's problem. When team members recognise their contribution to the outcome, responsibility is not experienced merely as an instruction passed down through successive levels.
Ownership Supported by Learning
Singhvi's leadership model pairs direct accountability with research and mentorship. Responsibility is intended to build professional engagement, while disciplined learning supports the quality of the work.
That emphasis on ownership sits alongside the firm's institutional relationships. Singhvi states that the practice serves as empanelled counsel for major public sector undertakings, nationalised banks, leading corporations, listed companies and numerous financial institutions. He attributes such trust to professional integrity and honest, direct counsel. These relationships make his cultural priorities commercially relevant: organisations seeking dependable advice need more than an individual lawyer's technical ability. They also need confidence in the habits through which work is undertaken and communicated.
The leadership challenge is to make those habits collective. Singhvi's answer combines the teamwork he admired during his internships with the personal accountability he values in practice. It avoids presenting institutional discipline and individual initiative as opposites. A team can share demanding standards while allowing its members meaningful responsibility. In his description, the purpose of a less layered structure is therefore not informality for its own sake. It is to create a stronger relationship between the person doing the work, the legal reasoning behind it and the client's interests.
Building the Lawyer Who Can Face Both a Boardroom and a Bench
Singhvi's advice to younger lawyers begins with breadth, but not aimlessness. He identifies three foundations for a sustainable career: diverse foundational experience, a hybrid mindset and execution agility. Early internships across corporate law, litigation, banking frameworks and policy initiatives can reveal both the diversity of legal practice and the area in which a lawyer may eventually build a niche. His own route informs the recommendation. Narrow specialisation, he argues, should not arrive before a young practitioner has had the opportunity to understand the choices available.
The hybrid mindset requires commercial literacy as well as legal knowledge. Lawyers should understand how capital flows, how a balance sheet works and how regulatory change affects a client's bottom line. At the same time, direct work under senior advocates or independent practitioners develops grit, client management and an understanding of courtroom realities. His ideal is not a practitioner confined to document review, but a strategist able to operate in a corporate boardroom and before an NCLT, DRT or High Court bench.
“Don’t just read the law; critique and analyse it.”
Operational excellence also requires sustained, detailed work. Singhvi encourages reading, writing and publishing articles, mastering databases such as Manupatra and SCC Online, and keeping pace with regulatory updates. He places equal weight on communication: an arbitral tribunal, a High Court judge, a lecture audience and an institutional client each require complex concepts to be expressed with clarity and brevity. Depth of understanding has limited practical value if it cannot be communicated accurately to the person who must act on it.
Before independence: Build varied geographical and practice experience, alongside a reputation for expertise and ethical clarity.
When establishing a firm: Maintain a standard fee structure and the confidence to decline untenable matters.
Throughout practice: Combine continuing scholarship with commercial understanding, precise communication and courtroom capability.
He cautions against launching an independent firm immediately, before that foundation has been established. The practice he urges young lawyers to build should be modern enough to address complex corporate problems and sufficiently rooted to withstand demanding litigation. That is also the clearest expression of his own professional blueprint. From land titles to investment structures, from teaching to advocacy, Singhvi returns to a single proposition: legal judgment becomes more useful when it connects disciplines without relaxing standards. The enduring ambition is not breadth alone, but breadth held together by research, integrity and execution.
