Apollo Tyres’ Atulya Sharma to join HSA Advocates

Atulya Sharma, global chief legal counsel at Apollo Tyres Ltd, is set to join law firm HSA Advocates after barely one-and-a-half years with the tyre maker, two people familiar with the development said.

Sharma, 46, will join as partner and will lead the firm’s banking and corporate finance practice, one of the persons said, asking not to be named.

Sharma is an alumnus of Delhi University and City University London and has close to two-and-a-half decade of experience. He started his career with International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s private-sector investment arm, according to its LinkedIn profile. 

Prior to joining Apollo Tyres in February last year, Sharma was with Deutsche Bank as the head of legal for the Indian subcontinent and Mauritius. At Deutsche Bank, he was responsible for legal support covering global markets, capital markets transactional banking, new funds and infrastructure/ project finance related transactions. He has previously worked with law firm Dua Associates and IDFC Group.

“Atulya has an eye for details and the ability to keep all stakeholders on the same page,” said a senior partner at a Mumbai-based law firm who has worked with him in the past. “He is known to simplify even the complex things in a manner that even a layman can understand.”

Phone calls and text messages to Atulya Sharma and Amitabh Sharma, managing partner at HSA Advocates, did not elicit any response. An email query to Apollo Tyres remained unanswered till the filing of this report. 

For HSA Advocates, this is another major recruitment within a month after Ramya Hariharan, co-founder of law firm Argus Partners, joined to head its Kolkata operation.

Recently, HSA Advocates had also poached Prateek Ghosh, Kolkata head of Delhi-based law firm Paras Kuhad & Associates, along with his entire team. This was within three months of a similar poaching by the Hemant Sahai-promoted law firm from Paras Kuhad & Associates.

“HSA Advocates seems to have hit another sixer in the game. In less than a quarter it has acquired two teams from Paras Kuhad & Associates and also Ramya Hariharan,” said Dinesh Sharma, founder of Personnel Junction, an advisory firm specialising in legal recruitments. "In the current market, when people are expecting huge work from corporate finance sector, it makes sense for the firm to hire the right talent to be ahead of the curve.”

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