Buried a few clicks into PDLegal’s site is a practice page that, in my view, undersells itself: the India Desk. It’s not a marketing label slapped onto a generalist’s bio. The desk is run day to day by Lakshman Shankar, an India-educated and India-qualified lawyer with more than twenty years of practice there, working alongside Doraisamy, employment and white-collar specialist Mato Kotwani, and Pranav Kamnani — a lawyer dual-qualified in India and New York who focuses on international arbitration and transnational litigation. That’s a genuinely specific bench, not a single partner with “India” added to an otherwise unrelated practice description.

The desk’s actual job is narrower than “cross-border advice” suggests: it coordinates legal support for Indian entities that need Singapore or Thailand law guidance, and for Singapore-based or wider ASEAN clients investing in or doing business with Indian counterparts. PDLegal has built working relationships with Indian law firms across commercial litigation, international arbitration, M&A and corporate advisory, and was named an “International Firm to Watch” by the India Business Law Journal in 2024 specifically for this work. One matter on the public record: representing an investor in arbitration over a 300 million Indian Rupee investment dispute under a Share Subscription and Shareholders Agreement, a case that produced what the firm describes as a seminal decision on setting aside an arbitral award — the kind of result that sets precedent rather than just resolving one dispute.

Singapore’s appeal to Indian businesses isn’t new — the city-state has long been the default Asian base for Indian companies looking outward, and SIAC has become one of the preferred arbitral venues for India-related disputes. What’s less common is a Singapore firm small enough to give a cross-border India mandate genuine partner attention, rather than routing it to a generalist associate three layers down from the partner whose name is on the pitch deck.

None of this means PDLegal is the right call for every legal need in Singapore. A firm with hundreds of lawyers and a 30-office international network — Rajah & Tann or one of the larger global firms with a Singapore office — will out-resource PDLegal on the largest capital markets deals or multi-jurisdictional disputes that need fifteen people on a single matter overnight. That’s simply not the scale PDLegal is built for, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. What it’s built for is mid-sized, commercially-minded clients — Singapore SMEs, Indian companies entering ASEAN, regional traders — who want a partner who actually knows their file, across corporate work, disputes, or both, without three different invoices from three different firms.