Sebi faces staff crunch in legal team

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) is planning to a recruitment drive to shore up its legal department. Sebi is also open to hiring young legal professionals on contractual basis in entry and mid-level positions and soon plans to issue an advertisement, said people in the know. The market regulator has been facing crunch as several of its officers are quitting after a few years of service as there is a huge demand for legal heads, who have worked with Sebi. Besides strengthening its existing workforce, Sebi is open to move personnel from other departments to the legal vertical in an event there is excess load due to crucial cases.

The move is triggered by exit of regulator exits of Sebi officers, particularly those working in their legal deparment. Recently, 31-year-old law graduate Sumit Agarwal, who was among the key officer in the legal team, quit to set up a legal firm. Agarwal had nearly a decade of experience in Sebi. There are several such instances, where Sebi legal counsels, including Sandeep Parekh, R S Loona, Dharmishta Raval, P R Ramesh and Raghavendra Prasad, have quit either to set up their own legal firm or to join leading corporate law firms.

Industry players say a lot of global legal firms setting up front print in the country or offshore centres, which is creating huge demand for such personnel.

"The demand for legal professionals has surged by up to 40 per cent in last two years. Secondly, a lot of legal experts are setting up their own law firm as many corporates now prefer to outsource legal work instead of having an in-house team," said Sunil Goel, managing director of GlobalHunt, a recruitment firm

Constant changes to the regulatory framework are also stoking demand. Earlier, only large companies used to have defined numbers of law firms but now the scenario has changed.

"We have now e-commerce, start-ups of which many of them working on innovations of products and technologies. Such innovation also bought complicated norms and that's one of the reasons why many of the youngsters who have experience starts offering the services in more competitive pricing and they earning more than working as a professional," said Goel

The attrition that Sebi is facing is common to other government institutions as well as retaining talent is getting challenging given the demand in the corporate sector, say recruiters.

"Government institutions needs to ensure that a continuous stream of fresh people join them. They also need to create a framework for lateral entry where people come in for 3-5 years and then go back. As labor market get more comparative and competitive for talent then government will also have to think harder about them," said Manish Sabharwal, co-founder and chairman of TeamLeaseServices.