You pay for my car, I pay for your dinner
We hadn't formally launched Trilegal yet when my friend Vinay, who was with a law firm in London, called. It was early March 2000.
Him: "Have you guys opened for business yet?"
Me: "Why do you ask?"
Him: "Because I have a deal for you."
Me, struggling to hide excitement: "Well yes, then we're open."
This was a complex, challenging transaction, for a listed Canadian telecom company. We approached the matter with what became our modus operandi in the early years: working hard and Anand Prasad (my Delhi-based co-founding partner) and I reviewing each other's work.
The pace of the deal was brutal, including meetings in the Maurya Sheraton during the day, all-night drafting sessions in our tiny Nizamuddin office and fractious negotiations every couple of weeks for light relief.
After a few months, there was a lull in the transaction. With little else to do, we kept ourselves out of trouble by getting head massages at a nearby barber's and preparing our first client invoice.
With the number of hours we had spent, even at our then low rates, we'd run up an impressive inventory. Insecure about whether our work was worth it, we wrote detailed narratives of work done and tried hard to make the invoice look professional. A week of drafting and redrafting yielded a bill of sublime beauty, promptly despatched to our client.
He paid within a week, god bless him.
To celebrate, Anand and I bought matching dark green Ford Ikons, upgrading from a Gypsy for him and a Zen for me.
When the client visited next, we went out for dinner together in one of our shiny new cars.
"Did I pay for this car?" he asked cheekily.
"Yes!" we replied in chorus.
"Then you're paying for dinner".
Our pleasure entirely sir.