This has been an unusually loud season for India and London. London International Disputes Week drew a heavy Indian presence; the LCIA and its counterparts have run symposium after symposium across Indian cities, often with Indian Senior Counsel leading from the front; and barely a month passes without another city firm expanding an India desk or an India-qualified silk joining a London set. The two markets are courting each other in public, and the courtship is genuine.

The visible tier is real, and it concentrates for sound reasons.

The matters that surface at conferences and in the law reports, for example investment-treaty claims, state-level enforcement, bet-the-company commercial fights, are very large:

• Cairn's award against India ran to roughly USD 1.2 billion;

• The ArcelorMittal–Essar dispute turned on an award of around USD 1.5 billion.

The firms that carry that work bill accordingly; the Law Gazette recently described hourly rates at the top global firms with the headline phrase "a dollar a second." And competing for the work is expensive in its own right. A serious India practice sustains a year-round business-development operation comfortably running into six figures a year before a single hour is billed. The business-class circuits between London and the Indian metros, the corporate hospitality, the conference sponsorships are all part of it. At those stakes, an Indian general counsel or a leading Indian firm routes the mandate to a London brand it already trusts. This follows the ordinary logic of risk: when the downside is existential, you instruct the most established name available. High-value work flows up to the global brands; institutional relationships flow back to the leading Indian firms.

The tier is genuinely concentrated - much the same names, in much the same rooms. It looks like a crowd because it is well-resourced and visible, not because there are many firms. The sheer cost of entry is part of what keeps it closed.

The harder problem appears when a firm tries to find the rest of the corridor in the data, because Indian cross-border wealth tends to travel in disguise.

Take the most public India-into-London matters of the last decade. When a consortium of Indian public-sector banks came to London to register their judgment against Vijay Mallya and freeze his assets worldwide, the firm that carried the mandate was a national UK firm better known for domestic financial services than for any India strategy. The banks did not arrive through an elite India desk. They arrived through an institutional banking relationship.

Or take the fight over Essar. When ArcelorMittal's American arm sought a worldwide freezing order in the Commercial Court against the Ruia family, the entities on the face of the proceedings were a Cayman-domiciled holding company and a steel company incorporated in Mauritius. The dispute was, at its root, an Indian corporate one. Almost nothing on the docket said so.

This is the rule, not the exception. High-value India-nexus disputes rarely feature an Indian-domiciled party. They route through Mauritius, Singapore, the Netherlands, the Cayman Islands, the BVI - routine cross-border structuring plumbing. The asset and the promoter are Indian; the name on the page is not. A firm scanning the cause lists for "India" will pass straight over a nine-figure battle between two offshore shells that is, in substance, entirely Indian. A good deal of the work India sends to London arrives recorded as restructuring, insolvency, or fraud, and never under "India" at all.

The same invisibility runs below the headline cases. A great deal of India-nexus work never reaches a reported judgment.

• The dispute settles, or is arbitrated in confidence, or it moves through the offshore structures above; and

• much of it is event-driven: it surfaces when a vessel is arrested, when a distressed asset has to be traced, when an offshore family trust fractures; and

• It tends to land wherever the matter forms and with whoever is nearest and competent to take it, rather than wherever an India practice has been built.

None of that makes the work smaller. It makes it harder to hear of, which is not the same as absent.

There is a more useful way to read all of this than as geography. Cross-border legal work increasingly converges along sector lines rather than national ones. A dispute today is rarely just "Indian" - it is a digital asset-tracing problem, an energy-infrastructure gridlock, a shareholder fight inside a Delaware holding company founded by a Bengaluru team.

A practice organised purely around the flag will keep arriving at the visible, crowded tier. One organised around where particular kinds of work originate has a chance of meeting the corridor where it actually forms. That is a harder thing to build than a desk and a conference calendar,  but it is closer to how the work behaves.

For Indian firms, who sit at the head of these flows as the advisers who decide which London practice receives a mandate, the question is worth turning inward. Are your referral patterns built around the corridor as it actually moves, or around the corridor as it appears in a conference programme?

For international firms, the question is sharper. A relationship-led strategy is well-suited to the corridor that turns up at the conference. The harder question is how much of the corridor that actually is and whether the part that does not announce itself has ever really been counted.

The celebrated corridor is crowded. Whether it is the whole of the corridor is a different question. Can it be answered by a guest list?

Prachi Shrivastava is a qualified lawyer, a former business journalist, and the Founding Advisor at Lawfinity Solutions which is a positioning strategy practice for law firms working across India’s cross-border legal corridors