Co-founder and Managing Partner, AZB & Partners | Founded 1995 | Mumbai
For the first decade of her working life in India, Zia Mody was a courtroom lawyer. She stood up in the Bombay High Court, argued cases against far more senior counsel, and at times argued against her own father, one of the most celebrated advocates the country has produced.
Then, in the mid-1990s, she stepped away from the courtroom and opened a small chambers to advise companies on deals. Her father did not approve. That chambers grew into AZB & Partners, one of India’s largest law firms, and Zia became the lawyer that Indian and global companies call when the stakes are highest. This is the story of how that happened.
Growing up at Soli Sorabjee’s dinner table
Zia was born in Bombay on 19 July 1956, the eldest child and only daughter of Soli Sorabjee, the jurist who would later serve as Attorney General of India, and his wife Zena. She has three younger brothers.
Law was the main conversation at home. She has described those family dinners as “frenetic, energetic, argumentative,” and said the law “appealed immediately”. “For me it was almost like osmosis,” she told Business Today in 2022. “I don’t remember ever wanting to do anything but the law.”
She has also credited her mother with clearing the path. Her mother, whom she described as the decision-maker at home, insisted that her younger brother become a doctor. “My father had probably wanted his eldest son to be a lawyer, but I think my mother squashed that,” she told the Harvard Law Bulletin in 2006.
After Elphinstone College in Bombay, she read law at Selwyn College, Cambridge, graduating in 1978, and took her LLM at Harvard Law School in 1979. She went on to pass the New York State Bar.
Five years in New York
Her first job was as a corporate associate at Baker & McKenzie in New York, where she spent close to five years. It was deal work, far from the courtrooms she had grown up hearing about.
She has often credited a senior there, Norman Miller, with teaching her the value of logic, brevity and clarity. According to Outlook Business, he would keep asking one question: “What is it that we want to achieve?”
In the early 1980s, her family wanted her home. “My parents told me it was time to wind my way back home,” she told Business Today in 2012. She returned to India and, in 1984, married Jaydev Mody, whom Outlook Business describes as her childhood sweetheart. He would later become chairman of Delta Corp.
A junior at the Bombay High Court
Back in Bombay, she chose to practise litigation. Accounts differ slightly on the year she returned, but by 1984 she had started out as a junior barrister at the Bombay High Court, working under senior counsel Obed Chinoy from a small office at Prospect Chambers. She shared a desk with her senior and had no secretary. “It was really starting from scratch,” she told Business Today in 2022.
The courts of the 1980s were not welcoming to a young woman. “There were hardly any women in the court,” she told YourStory in 2014. Clients doubted that she could argue as well as a man. She worked 16-hour days, six and a half days a week, according to the Harvard Law Bulletin. “You must understand that the man scores his first three points out of ten by just walking into the room,” she told Outlook Business in 2015.
Her breakthrough came through unpaid work. Chinoy had advised her to take on pro bono cases, and she joined a group of junior lawyers arguing for the Bombay Environmental Action Group, an NGO led by Shyam Chainani that was challenging builders over floor space index violations in south Bombay. The NGO won, and eight floors of a building called Pratibha were ordered demolished. “I would count it as my big breakthrough,” she told Business Today in 2012. “This gave me the confidence to argue cases.”
Over these years she also had three daughters, and she has said she kept going to court through her pregnancies. She has said she argued against her father in court, and lost every time.
The turn towards deals
In 1991, India began to open its economy. Foreign companies started looking at the country seriously, and they needed Indian lawyers who understood how they worked.
Zia saw her moment. “I wanted to do something on my own and the timing was right in the early 1990s,” she told YourStory in 2014. Around 1995, she slowed her court practice and set up a small proprietorship, the Chambers of Zia Mody. According to the firm’s own history, it started with 12 people. Outlook Business reported that she borrowed ₹30 lakh from Deepak Parekh of HDFC to get the practice going.
Her father was not pleased. “My father didn’t like my decision, he didn’t think a desk job was elitist enough,” she told Outlook Business in 2015.
The early clients were mostly Americans, people she knew from her New York years. Winning Indian business was harder. “Why would anyone come to the chambers of Zia Mody instead of going to a blue-chip firm like Mulla & Mulla?” she said to YourStory, recalling the question she faced at the time.
She did miss the courtroom. “Winning a case in court is the biggest adrenalin boost one can get,” she told Business Today in 2012, adding that she still tries to feel it “by osmosis” through her firm’s litigation team.
Two mergers and a new kind of firm
Most of India’s large law firms at the time were family firms, passed down through generations. Zia’s grew by merging with peers, something the Harvard Law Bulletin described in 2006 as previously unheard of in India.
In 2002, she joined forces with Bahram Vakil, a friend and fellow lawyer, and the practice became CZB. A Bangalore office followed in 2003. In 2004, CZB merged with Ajay Bahl & Co. of Delhi, and AZB & Partners was formed, named after its three founders.
The deals soon followed. In 2004, the firm advised the Tata group on Tata Steel’s acquisition of Singapore’s NatSteel, its first major overseas deal, and on Tata Motors’ purchase of Daewoo’s commercial vehicle business in South Korea. In 2005, Zia advised Citigroup on the sale of its stake in i-flex Solutions to Oracle. In 2007, she worked with the Aditya Birla Group on Hindalco’s acquisition of Novelis, and around 2010 with Bharti Airtel on its purchase of Zain’s Africa business, according to Outlook Business.
By 2006, multinational companies made up 80 percent of her clients, and women made up nearly 40 percent of the firm’s legal staff, according to the Harvard Law Bulletin. She ran the firm with clear partnership tracks rather than family succession, and she banned gender bias in hiring.
A seat at the bigger tables
As AZB grew, so did Zia’s role beyond it. She served on the World Bank Administrative Tribunal from 2007 to 2012, and as Vice President of the London Court of International Arbitration from 2010 to 2013. She sat on the Asia Pacific board of HSBC from 2006 to 2021, serving as Deputy Chairman from 2013.
Fortune India ranked her No. 1 on its list of India’s Most Powerful Women in Business in 2018 and again in 2019, calling her “one of India’s leading corporate lawyers known for her fierce negotiating skills”.
Her name has been attached to some of the largest transactions in Indian corporate history, including the merger of HDFC with HDFC Bank, Reliance’s Jio Platforms fundraise and Tata’s acquisition of Air India. Of the Air India sale, she told Business Today in 2022 that the government “was pretty smart in the Air India deal where we represented Tata.”
Soli Sorabjee died in 2021, of Covid-19. Speaking the following year, she said litigation remained very hard for women, but that corporate law had become easier. “Everybody needs talent,” she told Business Today. “And if they need talent, then women are talent.”
Where things stand
According to AZB’s own history, the firm’s strength had passed 800 people by 2025, the year it opened an office in GIFT City. It now has offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai and GIFT City, and Chambers & Partners ranks it among the leading firms in its global guide for 2026. Zia remains co-founder and Managing Partner, working alongside Ajay Bahl and Bahram Vakil.
“I am proud of being a woman in a man’s world, in the legal space,” she told Outlook Business in 2015. She began as a junior who shared a desk with her senior, and left a courtroom she loved to bet on a country that was only just opening up. The firm that came out of that decision now sits at the centre of Indian deal-making.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Sources: Harvard Law Bulletin (April 2006); Business Today (September 2012, September 2019, May 2022); YourStory (January 2014); Outlook Business (November 2015); Fortune India (September 2019); AZB & Partners firm history and partner profile (2025); Chambers & Partners (2026).
