The firm, described plainly

Sharma's Associates is a firm of advocates established in 2020 and based in Hyderabad. Its work sits across three related areas: the corporate and commercial work that companies generate in the ordinary course, the financial and regulatory matters that arise when something in that ordinary course goes wrong, and the intellectual property questions that follow from building something worth protecting.

A good part of the work is done as counsel to enterprises and banks: contract drafting, compliance review, litigation support and the everyday decisions that never reach a courtroom. Alongside that, the firm advises founders and early-stage companies, where the questions are usually about setting things up correctly rather than unwinding them later.

How the firm is organised

Working on both sides of the same statute, for the institution and for the small company dealing with it, changes how a matter is read. A banking compliance question looks different once you have advised the borrower; a founder's contract looks different once you have seen how an enterprise's procurement team will mark it up. Much of the useful advice the firm gives comes from that overlap.

Every matter is assigned to a named advocate who remains responsible for it from the first reading to the last filing, so that the person answering a question is the person who knows the file. The firm appears before courts in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, and advises remotely for clients located elsewhere in India where the matter does not require an appearance.

On legibility

Legal drafting has good reasons for being precise and poor reasons for being obscure, and the two are easy to confuse. Where a provision can be explained in ordinary language without losing its meaning, the firm explains it that way: in advice, in correspondence and in the documents it drafts. A client who understands why a clause is there is better placed to decide whether they want it.

Beyond client work

The firm takes an interest in matters of local public concern, including questions of public health and civic administration in and around Hyderabad, and in how emerging technology interacts with existing legal frameworks. This is not client work and is not undertaken for a fee.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.