Dassault Aviation Poaches Its Own Outside Counsel as India General Counsel

Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas has lost one of its aviation specialists to a client it has advised for years. Anandita Kaushik, who spent over six years as a partner at CAM handling defence and aerospace work, has moved to Dassault Aviation as General Counsel for India, based at the group's Dassault Aircraft Services subsidiary in New Delhi.

Kaushik, a 2009 law graduate of Symbiosis International University who later picked up an LLM in Mergers and Acquisitions from Columbia Law School in 2013, built her practice around PE-VC and M&A transactions in the aviation sector, advising both foreign OEMs and domestic players navigating India's defence procurement rules. By her own account, she had been advising the Dassault Aviation group specifically for close to a decade before formally joining. Before her stint at CAM, she spent six years at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas.

CAM's managing partner Cyril Shroff struck a notably gracious note about the departure, remarking that it was wonderful to now count her as a client of the firm rather than treat the exit as a loss. It's a move that fits a pattern seen elsewhere in the market: outside counsel who spend years embedded in a single client's regulatory and commercial challenges eventually get pulled in-house to run the function directly, bringing institutional memory with them that would otherwise take a new hire years to rebuild.