Khurram’s Quorum – Ep 028: Silpa Maruri on creativity, self-advocacy, and how to launch a law firm

Khurram’s Quorum – Ep 028: Silpa Maruri on creativity, self-advocacy, and how to launch a law firm

Silpa Maruri graduated from law school in 2011, but her career trajectory has been anything but ordinary. By 33 she had made partner at Quinn Emanuel, one of the most respected trial firms in the country. By 38 she had left to become a founding partner at Elsberg Baker Maruri, a new elite commercial litigation firm that had six trials on the docket within its first four months.

In this conversation, Silpa walks us through the specific techniques and principles that shaped that rise. We dig into how growing up as the child of immigrants trained her as an advocate from a young age, the creative legal arguments that built her reputation at Quinn, why being underestimated is a gift, and what it actually takes to launch a firm from the ground up with a one-tier partnership and a trial-first culture.

Keep reading below for the full episode and the complete transcript of our conversation.

Top Insights

Below are the highlights of our conversation:

• Childhood Advocacy as Legal Training: Growing up as the child of immigrants, Silpa frequently spoke up for her mother in everyday settings because her mother worried about being treated differently because of her accent. That early experience of advocating for someone else, and of translating complex systems for people who had no context for them, became the foundation of her work as a litigator today.
• Take Up Space, Get Given More Space: Silpa's breakthrough principle was to volunteer for hard assignments early, even when it felt risky. On one case with a tight budget, she took essentially every deposition herself as a junior associate. The experience compounded, each opportunity earned the next one, and her willingness to jump into spots other people would not occupy became her biggest differentiator.
• Being Underestimated Is a Gift: Young and South Asian in an industry where that combination was rare, Silpa sometimes had adversaries who assumed she would be easy to run circles around. Her answer: if the other side does not see you as a threat, they never see you coming. Time and again she turned that underestimation into a tactical advantage.
• Creativity Needs Both a Person and a Culture: Silpa believes creative legal reasoning requires two things: the lawyer's willingness to voice ideas and a culture that invites them. She credits Quinn for fostering that early in her career, and she has built the same expectation into Elsberg Baker Maruri by asking associates what they think about strategy on every case, not just the narrow piece in front of them.
• A One-Tier, Trial-First Boutique: Elsberg Baker Maruri was intentionally designed to stand apart from the market: fully equity partnership with no tiers, litigation only, trial focused, and nimble enough to run expedited matters from pleading to trial in five weeks. Silpa argues the demand for boutiques this year reflects a broader truth about the market, clients hire lawyers, not law firms.

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Full Transcript

Khurram Naik: Silpa, I'm so glad that we're sitting down to talk today.

Silpa Maruri: I'm very honored to be here.

Khurram Naik: Okay, so Silpa, we have a common experience growing up. We both have immigrant parents. And something I've heard from other immigrants, not just from South Asians but elsewhere, is this common experience of children as advocates for their parents and as intermediaries, being asked to explain things or translate things beyond just the literal words. It's more advocacy for your parents, and parents rely on their children for that. I think you have some stories about growing up and your parents asking you to step into that role.

Silpa Maruri: Yeah, definitely. One of the stories I was telling you about is pretty straightforward. We'd be in a Costco or a Walmart, and we'd need to ask a question about something, just a really straightforward question. Do you have this in another size or another color, something like that. And my mother would always ask me to do it. Sometimes I would push back because I was a young kid, and I'd say, you should be the one asking, they're going to look at me like I'm crazy because I have this little kid asking them questions about inventory. And she would always say she didn't want to, because she felt they would be rude to her because of her accent. So she would very frequently make me occupy that role instead of her.

Silpa Maruri: She's very good at English, actually. She's very well educated. Nobody would ever have a problem understanding her through her accent. But she was just worried that people would treat her differently, and she thought that me having an American accent would mean I'd get very different treatment from her. In a way it was good, though, because what it did was teach me to be very comfortable speaking with adults, even as a child, and even adults I didn't know, because I had to out of necessity. That was one of the ways I served as an advocate for her. I think that happens a lot with children whose parents have accents, or children of immigrants, because sometimes there's a level of discomfort. The parent knows the child is going to be accepted in a way the parent isn't. And it was good for me in terms of gaining experience I used later, because from a very young age you learn to be that advocate for somebody else. When you get into a job that is pure advocacy, like being a lawyer, that was training from a very, very young age I wouldn't give up for anything.

Khurram Naik: I think there's lots of career paths you could have had. Maybe you would have been a doctor or a business owner or some other path. So you didn't have to be a lawyer. It's easy to look back and cherry-pick experiences that impacted you later on. But that seems like a pretty reasonable one that would have big impact on your skills as an advocate. Is there anything else from your childhood where, looking back now, you feel there's a legacy or an impact from those early experiences?

Silpa Maruri: Sure. Another thing I frequently had to do, that I think a lot of people in my position have to do, is translate things that were going on in my everyday life for my parents, because it wasn't a part of what they experienced when they were growing up. The school system here is really different from the school system in India, where my parents grew up. There would be a lot of times where some project was due and they just had no context for why, because they had never gone through a similar school system. A lot of my childhood was spent translating what was going on and making it understandable to them, making it something they could digest and get their arms around.

Silpa Maruri: That is something we do as lawyers every day. We have to take something complicated, something that seems foreign, something outside the mainstream of what a regular person has to deal with, and we have to translate it into something that your everyday juror can understand. That teaching I had to do even as a young kid is something I find very useful as a litigator today. If I go in front of a jury, or even in front of a judge, there's a lot of translating that happens in terms of taking something complex and distilling it to its core essence. That's something I've had to do all my life. It comes pretty naturally to me.

Khurram Naik: Did you have any early inclination that you were going to go to law school?

Silpa Maruri: Certainly not as a young child. I don't think that's something I thought I was going to do. But by the time I was in high school, it was of interest to me because I loved writing. I loved this sort of teaching translation role I've described to you. And I loved the art of argument. It was something that was always on my mind as a possibility. It crystallized for me more once I went through college and saw a little bit more of what you could actually accomplish as a lawyer and understood a little bit more about the legal system than I did at a young age.

Khurram Naik: And when you went to law school, you didn't expect to be on the track you're on now, right?

Silpa Maruri: No, and we spoke about this. I actually went to law school thinking I was going to be a public interest lawyer, interestingly enough. I had done Teach For America, and I had a very significant body of nonprofit experience when I was in undergrad. I had done some basic tutoring for underrepresented youth and that sort of thing. So I went with a real public interest focus. It was actually by luck that I ended up in a law firm environment. I went through OCI and thought, let me give this a chance and see what it looks like in real practice. I wound up going to a firm thinking I would really leave in a short period of time.

Silpa Maruri: What I discovered while I was there was that I really loved complex corporate litigation. I didn't think I was going to have the same experience in a public interest environment. The work public interest lawyers do is obviously extremely laudable, and I have deep admiration for that. But what I found in a law firm environment was I loved the complexity of the problems. I loved looking at really complicated transactions and trying to figure out a creative angle. I loved the complexity of the litigation itself, the subject matter, the legal problems presented in corporate transactions. And I loved being around an environment filled with intelligent, hardworking people deeply engrossed in wrestling with that sort of content. And I was very good at it. The combination of those things really made me stay. Strangely, I'm not in this job because of the money, I'm not in this job because of the glory. I'm in this job because I'm the bizarre person who really loves grappling with these thorny corporate questions.

Khurram Naik: Your trajectory is pretty astonishing. You graduated from law school in 2011, you became partner at Quinn, and now you've launched your own law firm. That does seem like a remarkable set of accomplishments in a short period of time. What do you attribute that to? What differentiates you? There's lots of smart, hardworking lawyers, but you've had exceptional success. It's not going to be a single answer, but what do you think were some of the early experiences in practicing that set you on this pathway?

Silpa Maruri: Yeah, I appreciate that. I think it was a combination of things. My early experiences in particular were that I found the more I put myself out there to take up space, the more people wanted me to take up the space I was taking up. So I proved myself to be very skilled very early on, and I always threw my hat into the ring by volunteering for opportunities, even difficult ones. For example, I was on a case where there was a really restrictive budget. I was very junior at this point. The client didn't want to pay to have a partner take every single deposition or most of them. So I very willingly took essentially all of the depositions in the case, even the most important ones. It was difficult because there was a very restrictive budget, I hadn't done it before, and I was doing a lot of them back to back. But as a result of that case, I got tremendous experience taking high-level depositions very early on.

Silpa Maruri: My work ethic was really a big differentiator between me and other lawyers, because I was always willing to do things to go beyond the ordinary, which always resulted in me getting more experience early on. And I was good. I was skilled, and I applied my intelligence in a direction that helped me. I wouldn't have been able to succeed on intelligence alone. I don't think anybody enters a law firm environment and succeeds on intelligence alone, because that's the price of entry. But combined with my willingness to really throw my hat into the ring every time, and to do a little bit of that self-advocacy I was talking about earlier, it helped me get a lot of experiences early. It was cyclical, once I got one experience and did well with it, it lent itself to me getting a different experience later, and so on. It evolved very naturally at the time. Looking back, the thing that really helped me was being willing and able to jump into spots other people couldn't occupy.

Silpa Maruri: A lot of younger attorneys will shy away from opportunities like that because they're a little bit worried about the amount of work it entails, or they don't feel like they have enough time to do the thing they're being asked to do in the way they want to be able to do it. I really embraced a little bit of risk in that way. There were times I didn't know if I was going to be able to take a deposition for the first time and excel at it, but I did it because you have to do that in order to be a good lawyer. You have to force yourself to take the next step. You have to force yourself to take the opportunities as they come. All these tiny doubts I had about whether I'd be able to do something well the first time ended up being largely unfounded.

Silpa Maruri: The other piece of the puzzle was putting in the work to excel. You're not going to excel just because you want to excel. You're going to excel because you really dig in, learn the facts, learn the law, and map a strategy every time you're doing something. I was very intentional about always doing that for every big project I was working on.

Khurram Naik: That's something a lot of lawyers early in their career find challenging. It's enough to learn the substance of the work, how to communicate with partners and clients, and just that alone is plenty. But then advancing to a more strategic role, to say, hey, beyond the task, here's what I have, not only maybe the partner's big contribution in mind, but also potentially my own vision of what should be done here. I think that was challenging for me as an associate, and I think that's challenging for other lawyers who are very good at doing the work but have a challenge around saying, hey, I can be creative, I can be a creative legal reasoner. How did you make that leap?

Silpa Maruri: It's a good question, and I think there are two components that have to be there to make it possible. One component is you have to be willing to do it yourself. The other component is you have to exist in a culture that allows for it. I just happened to be at a place where people really fostered that. As you know, I came up at Quinn Emanuel, and people really invited a lot of creative thinking from their younger associates. A lot of the folks I worked with early on realized I was this very good creative legal reasoner, and they would come back to me time and time again because they knew I would be able to see things other lawyers didn't see.

Silpa Maruri: That's something we also try to be very intentional about at our own firm. We're very interested in developing our young lawyers and not just treating them as functionaries or cogs. We always try to get input from the younger members of our team on even minor aspects of strategy. That's twofold. One reason is it benefits us, young fresh thinking is never a bad thing, particularly when you're dealing with, for example, financial products that change all the time. The other piece is it also develops the lawyer. The more somebody's being asked to flex their legal reasoning muscles and to think hard about big, important legal problems, the better they're going to be at it when they are in more of a leadership role. That's something we really try to foster here, and part of the reason is because each of us, even though we're coming from different places, did have people in our spheres who did that for us. It yielded dividends for us, and it also yielded dividends for them, because oftentimes we would come up with a case-breaking theory.

Khurram Naik: You mentioned creativity. When did you notice creativity in yourself early on? What's an inflection point where you felt like, wow, I just realized I did something really creative here, where you got some feedback in that way?

Silpa Maruri: That actually happened to me fairly frequently. Like I said, that was something I was good at even early on, because I like legal reasoning and I like complex problems. I would frequently look at something and see an angle somebody didn't see. An example that comes to mind: I was on a case where there was a contract dispute, and our client had one interpretation of the agreement and the adversary had another. A lot of the adversary's documents about what they really thought the contract meant were behind the veil of privilege. Meanwhile, we knew they didn't actually believe in their interpretation. So we had to find a way to get at these other documents they were hiding under the cloak of privilege.

Silpa Maruri: I looked at the communications that had gone back and forth and realized they had not drawn a real line about privilege. They had kind of woven in and out of privilege if you really looked at the documents in a way that suggested they had treated us as if we were within the privilege, or waived the privilege. I came up with a very complex argument about why the privilege actually didn't apply. The end result was that the court found they had waived privilege. They had to produce all of their privileged communications, so much so that at the end of the litigation they didn't even have a privilege log, because they had literally produced every single document they had called privileged that was responsive. And the end result was that we were right. They didn't have the interpretation of the agreement they said they had. It was something they came up with for litigation. The documents we got from them showed that was true. It was devastating to their case. That's an example where, if I hadn't been asked as an associate what I thought the strategy should be, that never would have happened. That's why we value it so much here, because ourselves had so many experiences as associates where we came up with case-breaking theories.

Khurram Naik: So it sounds like you were taken seriously internally, where you were consistently treated seriously. By counterparties?

Silpa Maruri: No. And I don't think there's a lawyer in America who will say they have been, particularly as a young lawyer. As I said, I had a lot of experience very early on, and I had a lot of responsibility early on. Sometimes that resulted in my adversary underestimating me, because sometimes people say, oh, this is a young lawyer, I can wrap them around my finger, I can run circles around them because I have so much more experience than they do. I would say the lesson from that is that the best gift your adversary can ever give you is underestimating you. If you don't think anybody's a threat, then you never see them coming. I proved time and time again, when those situations arose, that I was up to the challenge, and usually I think people ended up regretting it.

Khurram Naik: Is being underestimated something you've encountered in your career generally?

Silpa Maruri: Look, I'm not going to say it doesn't happen. But I will say one thing I really enjoy about practicing law is that ultimately it is a merits debate. You're arguing about whether the law and the facts conform to a set of rules. That experience has been really gratifying, because yes, you will encounter some amount of nonsense all along the way, everybody does in every single litigation, but I think the beautiful thing about being a lawyer is that at the end of the day you're debating about something that has a clear set of defined rules and a clear arbiter supposed to resolve all those rules. You may not always love the result you get. Every litigator worth their salt has litigated a case they've lost that they felt they should have won. If you're not doing that, then you're just not taking the hard cases. But at the end of the day, for the most part, we've created a system founded on impartiality and on applying a set of rules. In my experience, that has largely been true, and it's been gratifying, because that's not true in every walk of life.

Silpa's take on being underestimated as a tactical gift reminded me of my conversation with Priyanka Timblo, who talked about how being doubted shaped her preparation heading into the trial that delivered a $101 million verdict. Listen to my episode with Priyanka Timblo.

Khurram Naik: I think that's our favorite part of the practice, that there's creativity to me, but there's also a set of rules, and that's a really interesting axis. At the end of it, there's a merit component. But I wonder how much you think there is an edge with understanding the judicial system. Let's say a judicial realist approach, how much do you buy into that? Let's say this judge, maybe you had some inkling this judge would find this nature of procedural dispute to be persuasive. Maybe this judge is more willing to rule on things or is just a little bit edgy. In any given district, there are judges that have more risk tolerance for things that could be overturned or not. How much is there a skill or an edge in understanding the judicial system in that way?

Silpa Maruri: I think it's there. I don't think anybody can really deny that these things make differences at the margins. But what I'd say is they make differences at the margins because of the way the system is designed. To those who say it's not a good system, I challenge you to define something better. It's very hard to design a perfect system in an imperfect world. It is not perfect, I will say that. Those things will matter, those things will make a difference. But fundamentally it is an elegant system and a very good one.

Khurram Naik: Going back to your progress at Quinn, then you're having all the success and you make partner. You're young to make partner, that's impressive. Had you, at the point of making partner, identified what in particular you enjoy the most?

Silpa Maruri: Yeah, for me, I loved most of the things you do as a lawyer. I obviously loved the stand-up work. I loved doing arguments. Oral arguments were something I really thought were fun, and I had a real skill at putting things in perspective, boiling things down to their core, simplifying complicated concepts. That was something I was really good at. I also loved doing depositions. I loved writing briefs. I am a lawyer's lawyer, and what I found by the time I was going up for partner is I liked doing all of the core components of the job.

Silpa Maruri: What I would say to somebody who's about to do that is you really have to think about whether this is something you truly love. Because it's very easy to take the road of least resistance and say it's the easy path to try to continue to be a litigator, try to continue to be a lawyer. But the people who really have the best experiences, and frankly who are the most successful, tend to be the people who have a genuine affinity for the job. They like doing the strategizing, they like doing the legal thinking, they like doing the work. Because at the end of the day, you work so much in this industry that you really have to love what you do, or you can really make yourself miserable.

Khurram Naik: By the time you're a partner at Quinn Emanuel, what's a part of the job you didn't enjoy?

Silpa Maruri: That's a tougher question. I generally enjoyed everything, and by the time I was a partner, I was doing a lot less of the things people don't like. I can't say I loved every time I had to do some doc review. I don't think anybody likes doing that. But by the time I was a partner, I obviously wasn't doing that sort of thing, or even when I was close to being a partner, I wasn't doing that sort of thing. That's a good lesson for the folks who are coming up, that some of the things that are less glamorous about the job become less of a core component of the job as you get more senior.

Silpa Maruri: At our firm in particular, we're very intentional about making sure associates get to do the things that are more fun. We want to make sure associates get stand-up experience. We want to make sure associates do get to do arguments. We want to make sure associates do get to do depositions. It's front of mind for us. Every time we're in the midst of a case, we think what can this associate do, what opportunities can we give this person. As a younger lawyer, when you're thinking about the menu of options in terms of law firms, that's a very important thing to think about. Is this a place where, when I look back in 10 years, I'm going to be happy I went from an experience-gathering point of view? We try very hard to be that place. I tried very hard to be that person even when I was at Quinn. I try even harder at it now, because it yields dividends for the firm. It's impressive what young lawyers can do. They come in with a set of skills, and I think oftentimes young lawyers are underestimated in terms of what value they can bring to the table. We don't want to make that mistake of underestimating them. We really try to give them opportunities very early on.

Khurram Naik: What would it take for you to take the leap? Partnership at Quinn is one of the best litigation-oriented firms in the nation, a very strong litigation practice. In some sense it was risky, and you had a lot to lose. At what point did you know you'd be willing to even do something like that? Or did it just take you by surprise as a partner, saying, I can't say no to this? How far back do the roots of that entrepreneurial venture and that risk taking go?

Silpa Maruri: Yeah, it's a good question. Let me start by saying I have deep respect for Quinn Emanuel. I left there on very positive terms, and I have a lot of close friends who are still there. It wasn't as if I didn't like it there. The reason I left was because I saw a real opportunity to be an entrepreneur and to build something that was a true reflection of me. A lot of the ways I've described to you during this podcast about a culture of mentorship, about creating a firm that is trial focused, about creating a firm that has a certain type of culture that I really wanted to build from the ground up.

Silpa Maruri: We've also talked a little bit about who I am and where I came from. It's been really gratifying to now be able to serve as a mentor to people coming up who look like me, who weren't necessarily always around when I was coming up 10 years ago. It's nice to finally be in a position to help other people in that way. Those were a lot of the reasons why I decided to go in the direction I did. And I'm very happy, because the firm is doing exceptionally well. We've got really great recruits. We've picked up some fantastic exemplary candidates. We've got a number of trials we're headed into this year. We have six trials in our first year, which is incredible for a firm that's only existed for four months. We've created what already feels like a very positive culture around mentorship and giving opportunities to associates early on. On one of the trials we just finished, associates played a huge role in examining witnesses at the hearing. That's something we're very proud of. It's something we openly tout. It's also something clients really like, because, as I said, often associates and younger lawyers are underestimated. But once people see them on their feet, they're really astonished by what they can do.

Khurram Naik: How did you come to this idea of taking this risk? Another lens on this is, you're South Asian, you're a woman. There hasn't been a lot of influence in the legal industry from that demographic. How did you come to realize it? It sounds like there's this wedge where you started reshaping the firm. You took up space, as a phrase you were saying. How did you feel like you could take up that space, in being this minority, in whatever sense you want to use that, in the law? How did you feel you could start to take more and more space, such that eventually that seems to be part of the roots of departing and launching your own firm?

Silpa Maruri: Yeah. I would say from early on I adopted the mindset that the client was my client. The client is of course a firm client, but the client is also somebody that every single lawyer on the team has a responsibility to. I always felt the weight of that responsibility, even as a very young lawyer. I felt very much that my role was as an advocate for that client. If I saw an angle, I saw an idea, I saw something I felt would be valuable, I voiced it. You always have to find a way to voice things respectfully. You don't want to go off on your own and run up a huge bill looking into something the partner has already thought about or doesn't think is valuable. But I found ways to offer my ideas in a respectful manner, and in a manner where I didn't run off the reservation and just do a bunch of work myself. I would say, I see this really interesting angle, we should take a look at it. More often than not, the reception I got was, yeah, take a look at it. The more I did it, the more comfortable I became. The more I did it, the more people trusted me, and the more space I had. It was an iterative process that took time. It took a little bit of initiative in the beginning to get comfortable doing that. As I said before, you also have to exist in a culture that allows you that space. I happened to be at a place where people were receptive to me offering those ideas. Were there times when people said, no, we've already thought about that, thank you very much, we don't need you to look at that? Sure. And in those instances, I listened. But I always took a shot.

Khurram Naik: Taking a leap from the certainty of partnership at an established firm to launching your own, there's plenty of reasons I think it was de-risked. It's not like you're just winging it, no idea whether you could launch a law firm. You had lots of reasons you thought you could. But still, there's a risk, the comfort and status of being at Quinn Emanuel versus launching your own. From a staffing perspective, from a financial perspective, what was the basis of taking that leap?

Silpa Maruri: There were a few different things. The folks I was partnering with are people I have the utmost respect and utmost faith in. David Elsberg is a tremendous lawyer and a tremendous talent. And Rolo is also just an exceptional lawyer and an exceptional talent. I've worked with both of those folks for years and years. I knew the three of us together would be able to do the work, bring in the business, and create something really exceptional. I fundamentally have faith in the fact that great lawyers will get hired, because that's what we do. We sell our legal services, and both of those lawyers are too exceptional not to get hired. That was a piece of the puzzle.

Silpa Maruri: The other piece was, I also had faith that they were going to build something good for associates and good for lawyers to work at. Not just a place where everybody is financially secure, but also a place where I could really be proud to come into work every day, because I knew we were creating the environment we wanted to create from a mentorship perspective and from a cultural perspective in terms of giving associates great opportunities. That has borne itself out, because the firm really is doing exceptionally well. More and more matters are coming in the door every day. I think that is because the market really understands the value each of us as individual lawyers has, and also the absolutely exceptional talent that exists at all different rungs of the firm, even today at close to its inception. Every single partner we have is an exceptional stand-up lawyer and an absolute monster intellectual talent. That is also true among the associate ranks. I've been exceptionally impressed by every single person I've worked with here. So the market understands, the market sees the work we're putting out, the market sees what we're doing, and I think the thesis is really bearing itself out.

Khurram Naik: If I remember right, your name partners were at Selendy Gay, and Selendy Gay is largely a number of ex-Quinn Emanuel lawyers. At the time those lawyers left to form Selendy Gay, had you thought about joining that firm?

Silpa Maruri: I hadn't. I was at a very different point in my career, and for a lot of different reasons that didn't make sense to me. This made a lot more sense to me in terms of the folks doing it. David and Rolo together were a different package to me than the folks at Selendy. I respect Selendy as a firm. They're a very good firm. I don't have anything negative to say about them. For me that wasn't really the right fit.

Khurram Naik: So you, David, and Rolo are the name partners. Why are there three name partners, not two or four? What is it about the three of you? What's the division of labor? Why is it the three of you?

Silpa Maruri: You could ask that question at any firm, except at some firms everybody who's a name partner is deceased because they've existed for that long. The reason is because the three of us are senior, have the experience, have the book, and also bring the right maturity to bear on the direction of the firm. That's not to say every single partner isn't valuable. We have three other partners, Michael Duvivier, Vivek Tata, and Jared Rocco. Each in their own right, they are absolutely exceptional talents. But they're a little bit earlier in their careers.

Khurram Naik: What's the division of labor between the three of you? How do you function together? What are your individual strengths as partners, either as firm administrators and managers or as litigators?

Silpa Maruri: Right now the partnership is small enough that a lot of the decision making is collective among the partners. That might change once you're massively bigger, because once you're massively bigger as a partnership, that becomes a less functional model. For now, most of the decision making is actually collective among the six of us. There are pockets of areas we've carved out for particular partners to be in charge of. For example, we have a partner who deals with some of the management of tax-related decisions. Those offices are largely occupied by folks who expressed an interest in wanting to be in charge of a particular area and who have strengths related to that area.

Silpa Maruri: We also have a CEO. Her name's Josette Winograd. She's great. What is wonderful about having a CEO is that the lawyers focus on the lawyering, and she does a lot of the more business-level decision making. Obviously the partnership has a very heavy say in the high-level things, but there's a lot you have to do to run a business on a day-to-day level, and fundamentally a law firm is a business. We would be lost without her.

Silpa's decision to leave the security of a Quinn Emanuel partnership and build something new echoes what Vishal Shah shared in his episode about going plaintiff-side and launching his own firm, including how to research the opportunity, pick your partners, and design the culture you actually want to work in. Listen to my conversation with Vishal Shah.

Khurram Naik: When you're forming the firm, did you figure out how to structure all this from scratch, or did you have any blueprints from other firms? How did you come up with even the most initial stages of forming a firm?

Silpa Maruri: David had a body of experience because he had done this at Selendy Gay. He had worked on forming a firm in the first place. Josette also had some experience because she came into Selendy Gay relatively early, in the early days. Both of those things were very helpful, because they had a wealth of experience I didn't have when I started at Quinn. It was a very well-established firm. Then there was the body of experience we had just because we had already been partners at other law firms. A lot of law firm administration is something you see on a day-to-day basis as a partner. You see how the accounting works. You see some of the more functional aspects of the firm work. We had that body of experience to bear.

Silpa Maruri: It frankly didn't hurt that a number of us, including myself, do a lot of breach of fiduciary duty and corporate governance-related disputes, because we have a bit more of a business mindset in terms of how to set things up. We also had advisors who helped us along the way in particular areas where we needed advice. What has been surprising to me is not the complexity, it's actually how in a lot of ways simple the model for a law firm really is. Fundamentally you sell legal services. You're not making anything, you're not producing anything, you're not extensively relying on any third-party supplier. It's actually a much simpler business than a lot of other businesses. You hire the right people, and then you sell their services. We had to navigate recruiting. We had to figure out how to bring the people whose services we would sell in the door. But that value proposition actually turned out to be easier than I thought. A large part of that is going back to the question of why Rolo and David. Because of who we are, because of how people in the industry know us, and because of all of the things the market already knows about us, people were drawn in. We got a number of resumes we never even solicited. People saw the press that we were opening a firm, and they started launching resumes at us, because they were so excited by the concept behind what we were founding and the people that were founding it. Recruiting has been easier than I thought it would be.

Khurram Naik: What's novel about the structure of the firm, compared to Quinn, compared to Selendy, some of the predecessors you're drawing on? In terms of structure, what's a departure?

Silpa Maruri: A few things. Number one, we're obviously smaller than Quinn. Number two, we have a completely equity partnership. There's no division between equity and non-equity. There aren't tiers of partnership. Everybody who becomes a partner is a partner, and there's no multi-tiered status. Beyond that differentiator, there's also just a general culture of mentorship. When I differentiate us from other firms, I'm not thinking of any particular firm. I'm thinking about the market in general. Market-wide, there's been a real trend towards a division between equity versus non-equity partnership. We've really stepped completely in the other direction and said, we don't want that type of division. What we want is a one-tier partnership. There may be valuable and important reasons why a lot of firms in the market have gone in the other direction, but for us it's very important to be a one-tier partnership.

Silpa Maruri: That differentiator is reflected in the overall values of the firm. We really want to foster mentorship. We really want to foster early participation in stand-up roles and strategy by younger lawyers. We think a one-tier partnership is a reflection of that. That is very important as a core ideal to us.

Silpa Maruri: Another thing that differentiates us from a lot of other firms is that we are a trial-focused litigation boutique. We are litigation only. A lot of firms out there are litigation plus corporate practice, and you'll see that reflected in their cultural norms around where lawyers sit and around how cases come in the door. We are more trial focused. We've actually been hired for a number of expedited trials, which is an area of particular specialization for us. We thrive on doing that. Whereas a lot of big firms can be clunky, can move slowly in situations where you need to move quickly, we're nimble, we're lean, and we can move very, very fast in those situations.

Silpa Maruri: Another big differentiator is just the level of talent we have. We've recruited exceptionally selectively. We are probably more selective than a lot of the big firms you can think about, because we're very intentional every single time we hire a lawyer. Every single lawyer we've hired is somebody we really think is a stand-up trial lawyer who will one day hopefully become a partner. Can I guarantee that for every single person? Of course not, because when you hire somebody, you are obviously hiring them based on the prospect of what they will do. But when we hire people, we do not hire people to fill a slot. We hire people because we genuinely believe in the talent they've showcased to us. It's reflected in the quality of what we produce. It shows when we pitch against other firms. We've frequently gotten the comment that our strategy and the level of thinking we put into a pitch vastly exceeds anything they're seeing from the other firms they're looking at.

Khurram Naik: Has anything changed about your approach to training lawyers, to associates? Is there anything different about it now than at Quinn?

Silpa Maruri: My approach is really to try from the very beginning to make sure I'm asking people what they think about strategy. Every single time we're doing something, I solicit input. Sometimes an associate coming from a different environment will be surprised by how often I do that. What did you think of this argument? What did you think of that argument? I really try to get people thinking early about the case in a holistic way rather than in a narrow way. There can be a tendency, especially in a big firm environment, for people to become the so-called expert on a particular arcane corner of the case, or to become the master of some minor area of the case. There can be benefits to that in the right type of case, but oftentimes what ends up happening, particularly with very young associates, is they don't have a real picture of the big picture. They've become isolated and start to feel not responsible for the whole case. What I try to do is instill a level of responsibility for the whole case in an associate, because that really yields a lot better work product than if they're hived off in some corner and not really thinking about the case as their own. We as a firm, and me in particular, really try to foster ownership of cases from the ground up, because it really does create a much better work product.

Silpa Maruri: Beyond that, we also try to give people experiences early on, because it develops them and it also increases their investment in a case. How much more invested are you in a case where you're going to be the one actually deploying the work product you create? You're really going to make sure that work product is absolutely excellent. There are a lot of reasons to give people opportunities early, and I would posit there are more reasons to give them opportunities early than there are not to.

Silpa Maruri: Something I've recently tried to emphasize more to people than I had in the past is also just trying to do business development from day one. It's something you'll never regret as a lawyer. It takes time, it takes additional effort. Nobody's really going to pat you on the back for trying to do that and network when you're a young busy lawyer with competing demands. But you will thank yourself later, because the earlier you start, the more you're going to realize the value of it more quickly.

Khurram Naik: What are principles of business development you use, and what are ones you prescribe to others?

Silpa Maruri: As a fundamental precept, you can't reach out to people only in times of distress. Then you're just a person they're hearing from in a time of distress. What you really need to do is foster a more rich long-term relationship with any given client, because then they're talking to you on an ongoing basis. They feel like you know them. They feel like they can trust you. They feel like you know their business. The real key to business development is continuity of contact.

Khurram Naik: What has worked for you in that way? What techniques do you use for sustaining that contact?

Silpa Maruri: For me it's pretty straightforward. Whenever I have an opportunity to reach out to somebody, let's say I see there's an article about them in the paper or some recognition they got, I send them a note. I try to have lunch with them. I try to check in with them. I try to catch up with them. That means you're staying top of mind with them when you're doing those things, when you're exercising those muscles, when you're showing a person you're paying attention to them, when you're showing a person you're paying attention to the company they work for and you really care about it. I think that makes them remember you when they're thinking about who is going to help me in this time of distress, who really cares about me, who's really going to care about my company and navigating it through this litigation.

Khurram Naik: This topic of business development is reminding me that you talked about ownership. I think that's a core principle that's clear in what you are training on, and then also creativity. Of course those two things are related. But I'd like to hear a little more about ambition, because when you first came to the firm you didn't expect to stay. You found yourself, wow, I really like these creative problems, and that really is my primary motivation here, not necessarily the money. So what role did, when did you discover your ambition?

Silpa Maruri: I was actually probably pretty ambitious from day one. That might contradict what I said about, I didn't know if I was going to stay there on a long-term basis. When I came in, I came in with an open mind, which is to say I came in open to the possibility that I would really love a law firm environment and open to the possibility I would really thrive in one. Because I came in with that mindset, I also came in with a mindset of, I'm going to do everything I can to really succeed in this environment and to really make the most of it. What ended up happening was I actually realized working hard was very rewarding to me. At the same time it was also supported by the ambition to get the best opportunities, because the harder you work and the higher the quality of your work, the more useful it is in terms of lobbying to get an opportunity to take a deposition or to pitch yourself to do an oral argument. Those things fed one another. I felt an ambition to get really quality experience, and that ambition forced me to do really quality work. Doing really quality work led to more opportunities, which fostered my enjoyment of my job, fostered my ambition certainly, and also fostered my development. These things are all interrelated. It may sound kind of cheesy, but your attitude can really shape your experience of a space. Having a positive can-do attitude on a lot of things actually made the work really, really rewarding for me.

Khurram Naik: When you think about your new firm, are there other firms that you admire?

Silpa Maruri: Of course there are other firms I admire. I admire Quinn Emanuel. I think it's a great firm, which is proven probably by the fact that I've done so much of my career there. But I don't necessarily know we're trying to exactly replicate one other firm. We're trying to build something different here in a lot of different ways. One way I mentioned is this one-tier partnership, which is a very important value to us. Another is creating and fostering a real environment of mentorship. What we really want to be is a firm that produces the highest caliber, highest quality work, truly premier, and also at the same time does it in the mode I'm describing in terms of having this very equitable partnership and building a positive firm culture. Our hiring standards are very high, because we really want to be a truly elite law firm. We don't ever want to be so big that we are hiring people to fill a space. We will inevitably grow because the demand is there for our services and the associate interest is also there. We repeatedly get interest from the highest caliber attorneys. We really want to create something that's in a class of its own, both in terms of the quality of work product we produce and the quality of the services we provide, and also in terms of the culture. We want to be second to none in terms of the culture we create for our associates.

Khurram Naik: When you think about the kinds of work you bring in, you mentioned you have an edge in expedited trials because of the nimbleness of your firm. How do you think about the kinds of work you want to bring in, whether it's plaintiff, defense, high-grade contingency? How do you think about that portfolio of work in terms of the other criteria you have about culture and quality?

Silpa Maruri: The expedited trials have been great from a cultural perspective, because every single lawyer we hired is somebody who has expressed a genuine interest in trial work. That's what we do. So the expedited trials have been met with a lot of excitement from our associates, because that's exactly what they want to be spending their time doing. It's a real chance, especially for the younger associates, to get very, very quick experience in what a trial looks like. For example, I just first-chaired a trial about two weeks ago that was an expedited arbitration that literally went from pleading to trial within about five weeks, which is absolutely rapid fire by anybody's standards. Every single person in the room said it was essentially the fastest they'd ever gone. It was an exceptionally rewarding experience for me, because I love trial work. I've done a lot of trial work. This was frankly the fastest I'd gotten to trial in any case ever. But it was also a really great experience for the associate who was helping us on the matter, because he got to do everything you do in a normal litigation, but he got to do it over this span of six weeks. He saw the life of an entire case over the course of five weeks. That was a very important learning experience, and one I don't think he'd trade for anything, because when things are happening that quickly, when you look back on it, you can really see how the joints fit together.

Khurram Naik: How do you figure out a mix of work? Hybrid contingency, plaintiff, defense. How do you think about that?

Silpa Maruri: We right now probably have more defense-related work than plaintiff-side work. We do have some plaintiff-side work. We have a mix of both, because both of those things are important from a business standpoint and from a cultural standpoint. The defense-side work is great. The contingency-fee-based work is also great. It presents some real opportunities to get younger attorneys' experience, which is very nice. But we honestly are able to do that even on the defense-oriented cases. From a firm practice standpoint, all of us as litigators have litigated on both sides of the v, so we're very nimble at doing both. I, for example, was the lead on the Dell class action, which was a billion dollar settlement we got from Michael Dell and Silver Lake related to a stock-for-stock exchange that happened in 2018. That was a contingency-fee case. It was a great opportunity, and it was really wonderful because the associates who worked on that case got a lot of really significant opportunities. It also set really important precedent in the state of Delaware and the Chancery Court, which is obviously the preeminent business court today. There are lots of reasons why we want to support a contingency-fee practice. It'll never be everything we do. It'll always only be a piece of the puzzle.

Khurram Naik: It sounds like a theme I was hearing about the launch of your firm is that it's come together more easily than you expected. You expected some challenges, but there have been some great tailwinds. What are some of those tailwinds? You reference the market. What are some market tailwinds you think you're capturing?

Silpa Maruri: No one can deny this year has been the year of the litigation boutique. There have been so many litigation boutiques that have launched this year, and there have been so many that have launched just recently. The real reason you see so many litigation boutiques is because there's a demand for them. People aren't necessarily completely satisfied with the big firm model of, here's a case, it's massive, we're going to put some number of associates on it, and those associates, some of them are going to be very high value, others of them are going to contribute less value. Then we churn the case. It's very expensive and we get to a result. A lot of people are turning to litigation boutiques because, fundamentally, A, what you really hire when you're hiring for a matter is a lawyer, you don't hire a law firm. Nobody really hires a law firm. And B, a lot of these litigation boutiques have a leaner model, where they can create the same value, but they won't necessarily staff the case in a way that doesn't make sense. For us, we hire only people we think are superlative. A lot of times we can do the same thing with three or four lawyers that might take eight lawyers at another firm. We have that brain power, we have that talent Marshall.

Silpa's emphasis on early opportunities and mentorship for associates, and her belief that young lawyers are consistently underestimated, reminded me of my conversation with Lora Krsulich, who as a first-gen lawyer at Susman Godfrey talked about finding her voice and what it took to build trust as a young litigator. Listen to my episode with Lora Krsulich.

Khurram Naik: It sounds like the firm has been even more successful than you expected. With that in mind, what has changed about your initial plans for the coming year? What's changed in terms of ambition or scope?

Silpa Maruri: We're probably going to hire a few more people than we thought we were going to hire. Right now we're at about 20 lawyers. We may hire a few more, because, like I said, both dimensions are met. One is we just have a steady stream of work. A lot of people are hiring us for a lot of different matters. The other piece is we have a lot of interest on the associate side. There are just a lot of people who have really expressed genuine interest in coming and working here. Those two things in concert lend themselves to hiring a few more people.

Khurram Naik: What are you most excited about on a year time horizon for your practice or the firm?

Silpa Maruri: It was really rewarding for me to first-chair that trial. I'm grateful to have had a lot of really amazing experiences as a litigator. I've done a lot of trial work, especially over the last few years, including the trial I just mentioned and a few other trials I had while I was at Quinn. What I really look forward to is getting another opportunity, getting the next opportunity to do more trial work, because that's what I really love spending my day to day doing.

Khurram Naik: Thanks for sharing your story. It's super impressive, your rise. It's been really helpful to break down the components of that. I certainly learned a lot about practice, and I think other people will have some great practice tips here as well.

Silpa Maruri: Thank you for having me.