Indian law firm Wadia Ghandy & Co is to review its international strategy following the closure of its Singapore office.

The 30 partner and 150-lawyer outfit, among the oldest firms in India and ranked band 1 by Chambers & Partners for domestic disputes and real estate work, shut its doors on Singapore less than four years after opening, citing a difficult economic climate.

The firm launched in Singapore in 2011, and had just one partner on the ground targeting Indian inbound work by Singaporean and international clients.

Joint managing partner Ashish Ahuja said it was difficult to generate new business in the city-state partly because non-clients going into India had already established relationships with local firms.

"For our existing clients, us being there didn't add value to them," he told Legal Week.

"[Other companies] stuck to their loyalties. There was already sufficient capacity. Most had already built good a rapport with Indian firms."

The closure of Wadia's Singapore office comes as India's largest law firm – Amarchand & Mangaldas & Suresh A Shroff & Co – takes steps towards opening its first international base, with Singapore on the list of possible destinations.

Joint managing partner of that firm Shardul Shroff said it remained extremely difficult for Indian firms to develop a foreign network of offices in light of restrictions on business development activites at home and a lack of Indian companies going abroad.

However, Ahuja remains optimistic about his firm's international expansion strategy, saying it is currently considering alternative geographies and practices.

He believes nothing more could have been done to make the Singapore base successful, it was simply a case of tough economic circumstances. For now partners will continue to focus on the firm's six Indian offices located in Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai and Pune.

"We will always pursue an international strategy, but we need to do it at the right point of time, we need to go back to the drawing board.

"[With Singapore] I think we were in the right place but at the wrong time."

Singapore's legal market is currently being tapped by a raft of international firms and Asian legal outfits, despite imposing a strict set of rules which ban the majority of foreign lawyers from practising locally.

As South East Asia's main legal hub, it is a base from which many firms service markets such as Indonesia, India and the Philippines, and continues to host a large number of regional arbitration proceedings.

Earlier this week, the government also announced the opening of Singapore's new international mediation centre.