India lawyers launch first pickleball auction for LawStrings league season two

India’s first-ever pickleball player auction built for lawyers will give the LawStrings Pickleball Premier League a franchise-style edge when Season 2 gets rolling in South Delhi. The auction is set for May 3 at The Suryaa in New Delhi, before the league’s second season is played on May 9-10, and eight franchise owners will bid from a curated pool of legal professionals using a virtual points-based system.

That format changes the feel of the competition immediately. Instead of simply signing up and showing up, teams will be built through bidding, strategy and squad balance, a model that borrows from larger franchise sports and gives this niche league a bigger public profile. LawStrings says Season 2 will be “bigger, sharper, and more competitive,” and the auction is the clearest sign yet that the event wants to be more than a one-off recreational gathering.

The league has already shown it can produce a real sporting finish. Its inaugural season in 2025 featured eight teams, and Smash Squad beat Legal Pickle in the final to take the Gold Cup, while Net-workers finished third. That first run helped establish the league as a serious inside-the-profession competition rather than a novelty match day, and it built a base of legal professionals who now have a reason to follow team identity, roster changes and auction value as closely as any franchise fan.

Shubham Malhotra, the Delhi-based legal consultant who founded LawStrings Management, has turned that momentum into a sharper product for Year 2, with support from Senior Advocate Sacchin Puri. The owner group also gives the league an unusually strong legal identity, with names associated with the franchise setup including Sonia Mathur, Amarjit Singh Chandhiok, Guru Krishna Kumar, S. Muralidhar, Vivek Sood and Suryaveer Singh Bhullar. That lineup matters because credibility is often what separates a passing social event from a repeatable sports property.

The bigger story for Indian pickleball is how quickly the sport is moving into structured, sponsor-friendly spaces. The Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports recognised the Indian Pickleball Association as the official governing body in May 2025, and India was then said to be hosting the Pickleball Asia Cup 2025. The 4th IPA Nationals in January 2025 reportedly drew more than 500 players from more than 20 states and used 14 international-standard courts, while the 2025 calendar was expected to include more than 30 sanctioned tournaments nationwide. Even with governance friction after the All India Pickleball Association opposed the recognition in an April 25, 2025 letter, the direction of travel is clear: pickleball is becoming organised, visible and commercially legible.

For that reason, a lawyer-only auction in New Delhi is more than a quirky subplot. It shows pickleball adapting to India’s professional class, creating recurring teams, stronger rivalries and a clearer path to mainstream attention.