The rise of moonlighting in Indian law: A cultural perspective

My understanding of the world and how business actually gets done was shaped by five years I spent in Gujarat during my graduation, where I first understood what hustle really means. Many Gujaratis have a deeply cultural relationship with what they call latent income: you need a job and a side income, and the two are complementary, not conflicting. Strikingly, the side hustle never comes at the cost of the primary job; it runs on its own, is held together by family, or operates entirely outside working hours. The job is protected; the side income is built around it.

The person who first explained this to me was my favourite Dabeliwala in Sector 24, Gandhinagar, a driver for a government employee, working eight to five. While he was at work, his wife prepped the components for the dabeli. He came home at five, freshened up, and ran his stall until around eight before returning to his job the next morning. That man taught me more about enterprise than most business books since. The same spirit was visible everywhere in Gujarat - from the auto driver with a dairy business to the watchman running a stall after his night shift: your money needs to work for you, not the other way round.

So when people ask me whether moonlighting can be stopped in law, I want to first sit with that question honestly before I answer it. Because the impulse behind moonlighting is not always dishonest. Sometimes it is simply human. Can you stop it entirely? I think eventually you cannot. You can detect it. You can address it when you find it. But detection itself is a significant challenge. And before we decide how to respond to moonlighting, I think it is worth understanding what is actually driving it.

Inflation in India is at a level hard to imagine a decade ago, and the tussle between employer expectations and employee needs is intensifying across every sector. Any promoter or HR manager will raise three concerns within minutes: the skill gap, the knowledge gap, and the expectation gap, real on both sides.

India is also becoming a very different country from the one many of us grew up in. Consumerism as a mainstream force is recent here; fifteen years ago coffee shops and malls were still aspirational. Now we have a generation that socialises and travels with a clear picture of the lifestyle it wants, alongside real responsibilities: ageing parents, families supported while careers are built. The cost of being a responsible adult in urban India is genuinely high, and when someone takes the best job available and feels they deserve more than it pays, seeking additional income is a rational response from their perspective.

I have been on both sides of this. My generation tended to curtail ourselves and live within our means. Today's generation embraces life more fully, and curtailing a wish feels, to many, like limiting a fundamental freedom. I understand that, even when it complicates running a law firm.

Moonlighting in law has also been accelerated structurally, by the startup ecosystem and the aggregation of legal work through freelance platforms. India has an enormous number of small businesses and startups that see legal expense not as a legitimate cost but as a hassle to be minimised and shortcuts follow. Freelance platforms aggregate such price-sensitive clients with lawyers willing to take on work outside their regular employment. The match is logical; the problem lies in where it leads.

The law firm landscape is also changing, from a consolidated structure of a few large firms and solo practitioners to a growing middle layer of niche practices offering Tier 1-quality exposure through a leaner structure. Many young lawyers want to build something similar, but there is a difference between building something and believing you are when you are not. Many lawyers I have interviewed left full-time employment because freelance work picked up and they concluded they were running their own practice. They were not: such clients are, by definition, not yet established, and typically stop using freelance platforms after their first round of institutional funding, leaving the lawyer without income or the institutional relationships that once sustained them.

Real business development in law is not aggregation. It is trust built over time through sustained engagement and demonstrated value the only foundation for a lasting practice, and no technology changes that trust takes time. When I conduct orientation at my firm, I always ask: what do we sell? Answers vary: justice, expertise, solutions. The one I return to is this: we sell portions of our time and capsules of our knowledge, our real currency as advocates.

This is why the ethics of moonlighting deserve more honest examination than they typically receive. When a firm takes a retainer client, it commits a defined amount of time to that client's matters; diverting that time elsewhere harms the client, a straightforward breach that most people accept. The same logic applies when an employer engages an advocate on a fixed arrangement, expecting committed hours in return. Quietly diverting that time elsewhere puts the employer in exactly the same position as the deprioritised retainer client. The situations are structurally identical; the difference is only whether we call it a breach of contract or something we quietly tolerate.

Not all moonlighting is the same. A genuine side income, run entirely outside working hours without touching performance or obligations at the primary job, is different, and many manage it with integrity, as the Dabeliwala did every day. The problem begins when side work bleeds into the primary commitment: leaves taken for freelance deadlines, firm resources and client access serving a parallel business, colleagues teaming up to moonlight on bigger assignments using the very infrastructure of the firm that pays them for sustenance.

There is a further dimension, less discussed and, in my view, more serious. A growing category of law firm management professionals, business development staff, and client relationship managers at larger firms encounter clients who cannot afford the firm's fee structure. Rather than referring such a client elsewhere within the firm, some quietly direct the work to a smaller firm at a lower price and take a cut. This can look like resourcefulness, but it is something else: the professional is paid by one firm to build its client relationships, and the access and trust that made the referral possible were built using that firm's resources and reputation. Redirecting that value for personal gain is a simultaneous breach of fiduciary duty to the employer and an undisclosed conflict of interest with the client, who almost certainly does not know the introducer has a financial stake in it, nor does the employer. This category operates invisibly, harder to detect than a lawyer on a freelance platform: the firm sees no output failure, and the breach sits entirely in an undisclosed financial relationship beneath what looks like normal conduct.

The pressures on young professionals are real, and the aspiration to build something of one's own deserves to be taken seriously. But real things are built slowly, on real foundations. If what you are building depends on access, relationships, or data belonging to someone paying for your time, you are borrowing from another's foundation without their knowledge, a debt that eventually comes due, usually disproportionately to whatever short-term gain was sought.

There are no shortcuts in life. Only consequences.

The advocates who have built something lasting did so through sustained effort, real relationships, and an honest accounting of whose time and resources were being used to build what. Everything else is an arrangement that looks functional until it isn't.

To those navigating these pressures, I offer no judgment and no easy answers. The profession is harder to enter than it was, the costs of a professional life in urban India are higher, and the gap between aspiration and income is, for many, genuinely painful.

What I would offer instead is a longer view. The currency of an advocate is time and knowledge. Both accumulate with care and diminish with misuse, and the most important investment any professional can make is in the integrity of how they use both, an investment that compounds in ways no freelance platform, and no undisclosed cut from a referral, ever will.

About the author: Anuroop Omkar is the Managing Partner at AK & Partners.

Note from AK & Partners:

As AK & Partners completes a decade as a law firm, we are launching a thought leadership series that brings a young, outsider’s perspective to a centuries-old profession. Through this series, we hope to examine the legal profession not only as it is practised, but also as it is lived by a new generation of lawyers and professionals navigating changing expectations, evolving work cultures, and the realities of modern practice. AK & Partners holds ISO 27001 (Information Security Management) and ISO 42001 (AI Management Systems) certifications.

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