Allen & Overy (A&O) has extended its referral relationship with Indian best friend firm Trilegal for an indefinite period.

The agreement comes after A&O senior partner David Morley (pictured), managing partner Wim Dejonghe, India head Jonathan Brayne and a number of other India group partners met with Trilegal in India in November last year.

A&O first entered into a non-exclusive referral relationship with Trilegal in January 2008 for an initial three-year period, which was scheduled to come to an end last month.

The relationship was further cemented when capital markets partner Srinivas Parthasarathy left A&O's Singapore office in October 2009 to join Trilegal as a partner in Mumbai and head the capital markets group at the firm.

Brayne said: "We meet with Trilegal every year to discuss the relationship and it seemed appropriate to formally extend it at this time. When we set up the three-year term initially it did look as though liberalisation of the market would happen in three years, so we thought we might need to revise it at the end of this term.

"Given that this is now not the case and the relationship is going extremely well and we are working together more and more on business development as well as referral work, we thought it was right to extend it indefinitely."

The news follows the dissolution of the best friends partnership between Clifford Chance and India's AZB & Partners last month.

The two firms decided to downgrade their 'best friends' relationship to 'good friends' at a meeting in January 2011 due of a lack of referral work on both sides and fading hopes for the long-awaited liberalisation of the Indian legal market.