Most law firms measure their history in partner cycles. A chambers in Nabha, Punjab, measures its own in generations. Dewans & Associates traces its founding to 1919, when the princely state of Nabha still held its own courts, and the practice has remained in the same family since. In an era when Indian law has consolidated into glass towers in Delhi and Mumbai, the firm’s continuity is itself the story: over a century of uninterrupted practice, carried today by its fourth generation.
The Present Principal
That generation is represented by Dewan V V Goyal, whose career reads less like a small-town succession and more like a deliberate circuit of the profession’s summits. Trained at Harvard Law School, Goyal worked with Baker McKenzie, one of the world’s largest law firms, and took assignments with the World Bank and the United Nations before returning to independent practice as counsel before the Supreme Court of India. The unusual arc, global institutions first, home chambers second, shaped a conviction that now defines his work: that the hardest disputes are lost or won in strategy, long before they are argued in a courtroom.
TARKA and the Strategy-First Model
That conviction has a name. TARKA, Goyal’s cross-border strategy practice, advises on India-linked disputes for clients and counsel across the United States, Singapore and the Gulf. Its premise is contrarian in a profession that bills by the hour of talk: TARKA works written-first, delivering structured strategy briefs rather than meetings, on the theory that a dispute’s decisive moves deserve the same drafting discipline as its pleadings. It is a model built for foreign parties who need Indian litigation reality translated into decisions they can act on, without flying anyone to Delhi.
An Old House, Deliberately Quiet
Alongside the disputes work sits Infeenity Law, the family group’s research and innovation arm, where the firm’s experiments in legal technology and practice design are housed. The group does not advertise, in keeping with both the Bar’s traditions and the family’s temperament; its work has always travelled by reference from one client to the next.
There is a certain symmetry in a practice founded in a princely state’s courts now advising on disputes that cross oceans. The instruments have changed, from typewritten petitions to cross-border strategy memoranda, but the trade underneath has not: knowing the forum, weighing the opponent, and keeping one’s counsel until the moment it counts. After a hundred and seven years, the house in Nabha still practises exactly that.
