An announcement from Harvard Law School’s Brittany Brewer, who’s currently in India carrying out some interesting research. Do help if you can, it looks interesting.
Tired of the oppressive corporate law firm hierarchy? Wish your law firm would implement a more supportive corporate structure?
Sign up to participate in a Harvard Law School study on how the structural characteristics of corporate law firms hinder the growth and development of lawyers. Your participation will help create an environment in which every lawyer has a chance to develop and ascend to the high ranks of his/her law firm.
The interview takes just a few minutes to complete and every participant will be entered into a raffle to win a special prize!
Eligibility: Lawyers at all levels of law firms are invited to participate. All information collected will be reported anonymously and any information that could personally identify a participant will remain confidential.
How to participate: Please contact the researcher, Brittany Brewer, at 99209 87421 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to set up an anonymous and confidential interview.
Thank you for doing your part to make the corporate law firm environment a better place for us all!
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All interview participants will contribute to this goal by providing an insight into their experiences in the corporate legal environment. I sincerely hope you will consider participating in the study; your experiences will help me tailor the list of best practices to the needs of the Indian corporate law firm.
u r appropriately commenting as Kelso
lets look at this way. suppose, the survey does come up with changes a law firm should make. Will the firm carry it out ? will it 'want' to carry them out.
sometime back there was another article by a professor who had done a similar survey. legally india as well as a corp law blog had given a link to the article. What happened ? any firm made any changes.
What about AMSS ? they asked BCG to make suggest some changes. were any implemented.
There is far too much comfort in making money out of ignorance. and opaqueness.
one should participate, as it would show the true colors of the partner-proprietor nature of family run law firms. but i really really doubt if any good will come out of it.
pessimistically: just another study to show how pathetic the system is.
I would be happy to discuss these reasons with you further during the interview (see, I can be persuasive!) and hope that you will encourage your colleagues and friends to participate. It is my firm belief that nothing will change unless there is an effort to make a change, and I hope that my work will contribute to this endeavor.
I hope that assuages your concerns and I hope you will consider participating in the study.
Thank you for your interest, though, and please do send my contact information to your friends and acquaintances currently working in law firms.
On the other hand, if i write from my personal email id, how would you know that I am a lawyer working in an indian law firm.
I am sure many people would have concerns discussing "oppressive corporate law firm hierarchy" of the firm which employs them while disclosing their identity.
Is there an alternative way out?
If you would like to hide as much of your identity from me as possible, you may call me for a phone interview, during which I will ask you only the absolutely necessary personal details (your firm name and your year at the firm). You should also feel free to contact me using your personal email account. You are correct that I will have no way of knowing that you are actually a lawyer at an Indian law firm, but there is such a small likelihood that someone who is not a lawyer would have the interest and knowledge to orchestrate such a ruse, that I am not really concerned about that possibility.
I hope you will consider participating, as I am very committed to making sure that the information is protected!
Great initiative. Please could you share some more credentials, i.e., your profile link (preferably on the Harvard site or such like) and Harvard's funding commitment, so that I am sure I am dealing with an independent researcher.
Subject to the above, I will be participating and would definitely encourage all friends and colleagues to do so. This is a great opportunity to achieve greater transparency in law firms in India. It's about time! We have some really good lawyers in India and we should all work together (including law firm managements) to create a meritocratic and transparent work environment. This will also reduce the number of Indian lawyers opting for foreign firms purely to work in a meritocratic environment.
If the research team is filled with NRIs or second-gen ABCDs, they'll think they know India but will actually have little or no idea of the diversity of practice here. One example: Jayanth Krishnan's drop-in, drop-out and publish a report sort of research that appears original and has the salutary protection of being unverifiable by his Caucasian colleagues.
This Harvard thing sounds just as silly. The result will be something
Ike this:
"Twenty two percent of Bihari indentured rock crushers complain of heavy workloads and an unwillingness of management to share profits or create a meaningful career path at the firm for non-family members. Fourth-three percent said they would like a chair, or at least enjoy sitting once in a while, and hoped for the day when foreign quarry managers would be allowed to enter the market."
What the heck are they smoking at Harvard these days? Brittany! India needs your insight!
An announcement from Nirma Law School’s Boo Radley, who’s currently in Boston carrying out some interesting research. Do help if you can, it looks interesting.
Tired of the oppressive US corporate law firm hierarchy? Wish your law firm would implement a more supportive corporate structure?
Sign up to participate in a Nirma Law School study on how the structural characteristics of US corporate law firms hinder the growth and development of lawyers. Your participation will help create an environment in which every lawyer has a chance to develop and ascend to the high ranks of his/her law firm.
The interview takes just a few minutes to complete and every participant will be entered into a raffle to win a special prize!
It's sweet of Brittany Madame to take time off from her Gender and the Law class, or whatever drivel they study at Harvard these days, and give we developing marketeers some light from her big league torch. But I don't think the approach will like yield anything but another post in LI and fell an American tree to print Brittany's journal article. Her research approach simply lacks validity.
It's perfectly valid to disagree with me, but you could not be more wrong about my personal situation. I very happily have one JD from a leading law school, and two law degrees from leading Indian institutions. Never even desired to go to Harvard! But don't get me started on Yale....
I am genuinely looking forward to the boneheaded insights likely to be yielded by this little survey.
I would tend to agree that it is questionable how many firms would actually implement any of the findings or how applicable they will be, but merely independently documenting the current situation will be invaluable - similar to Jayanth Krishnan's research, for example:
legallyindia.com/.../...
Surely if an India-based institution or academic did such research, then the foreign universities wouldn't have to do it, at the risk of attracting scorn or what some might see is stating the obvious.
Trouble is that few if any Indian academics and universities seem willing to be critical of law firms or the profession, or to alienate the hands that feed/fed/will feed them.
Arguably there is an unhealthy nexus between legal profession and academia in India, resulting in little if any scrutiny in the way the industry works, is regulated and the way inequalities propagate in the discussion.
So, here's calling all domestic academics: please do some serious and daring research; Legally India promises to help out, however it can.
If I have missed any papers or research that have been serious and daring, please do forgive me and share a copy here.
Best wishes,
Kian
I would like to start by inviting all who have expressed doubt about and interest in my research to help me analyze the data I receive. If the concern is that I am incapable of truly understanding such data in the context of the "social, economic and political" (see "Dazed and Confused," hereinafter "D&C") nuances of the Indian legal market, then I implore you to help me analyze the data and turn this admittedly challenging study that I have undertaken into a relevant and significant outcome. To help assuage some concerns, I will tell you that I have already solicited the assistance of a variety of academics, legal professionals and researchers from India, with expertise in the field of the Indian corporate legal market, who are committed to helping me -- that being said, I would still welcome the opportunity to work with others, including anyone who has expressed interest on this site.
As Kian suggested, there is indeed a dearth of scholarship on Indian corporate law firms (if I am mistaken about this, kindly direct me to the studies that have been written on this topic) and I am simply trying to fill what I view as not only a void in Indian scholarship, but also a void in global scholarship. The lessons that I learn here may not be directly transferable to the Western corporate structure (or vice versa, a fact that I definitely understand), but they certainly have the potential to influence the practice of law in other emerging markets, as well as the rapidly globalizing legal market. My intention here is not to "drop-in, drop-out and publish a report," (D&C) but rather to start a hopefully lasting conversation about law firm structures in India, a topic that has been largely untouched by academic scholarship (again, if I am mistaken about this, kindly direct me to the studies that have been written on this topic).
After my study is published -- optimistically, with the input and assistance of the individuals on this site who are skeptical about my qualifications and credibility -- I invite you all to review, criticize, challenge, and maybe even praise the work I have done. After all, it is your right to question the capabilities of a "Brittany" or a "Jayanth" (D&C) or anyone else. And, if you find that my insight lacks "validity," and an "understand[ing] about the actual operation of Indian law firms," (D&C) then I hope that you'll take the time to challenge it and correct it with your own original research.
Thank you all again for sharing your thoughts. I hope your passion about these issues will inspire you to contribute to my study in whatever way you can!
Brittany
Very nice and professional response. I hope this puts to rest all the personal attacks happening on the site and some real contribution in terms of participation in research comes forward.
All the best !
P.S: I am not in a corporate firm hence unfortunately not of any help. I will see if any of my friends know people who are in corporate law firms to participate in your survey.
2. ZERO transparency when it comes to appraisals and increments.Appraisals are a joke. Increments are a BIGGER joke! Waste of paper!
3. Too much power in the hands of so called partners who wouldn't even cut it as associates.
4. ZERO focus on client development- sit pretty and wait for work to fall in their laps.
5. Aversion to change.
6. Crab mentality- prevent dynamic ideas and persons harboring the same from rising up the ladder.
There you go Brittany- That's law firms in INDIA for you.
Good luck!
However, lack of qualifications does not seem to bother Harvard as far as law goes. For instance, Ashish Nanda, who is Harvard's Robert Baucher Professor of Practice, has no law degree and has never practiced law. He holds engoneering and management degrees from IIT and IIM. What he's doing teaching about legal practice is anyone's guess.
Guhan Subramanian - seems well enough qualified to teach business law, and he does not appear to dabble in India-related research. Except he appears never to have practiced business law, and instead passed straight from grad school into teaching at Harvard.
Maybe I missed some names in my two-second research, but there does not appear to be much bench depth in Indian law at Harvard.
Further to Brittany's particular qualifications for this inquiry - I can easliy imagine that the women's studies or cross-cultural folks at Harvard Law would go all Edward Said or Noam Chomsky on any Caucasian male student with the temerity to proffer advice on Indian law firm administration based largely on surveys. What has she done to earn the right to comment on us? She may have such a qualification, but it is undisclosed.
The reality of high-level legal practice in firms is quite simple, as we all know: a few personality and family driven firms have successfully lobbied for an unwarranted monopoly on high-end legal practice under the guise of nationalism, and these firms are free to exploit their staff as they wish.
So, yes, there is a crying need for serious scholarship on Indian legal practice. It won't be done from a distance, for sure. And it almost certainly won't come from Harvard. We don't have enough media coverage to statisfy their faculty needs. Yes, Friday is "Be Harsh on Harvard Day." Just because!
Does Brittany need to do anything at all to "earn the right to comment on us"? (Emphasis supplied)
LI, are you covering the release of the first batches of the AIBE scores? They seem to have left out Bangalore for some reason. Did I miss your coverage of this story? You could run an open post inviting people to comment on their scores, and discern any patterns. Perhaps Brittany could even crank out a survey for you!
1. Management of most tier 1 firms is delusional, they have said the same lie to themselves so many times, that they now believe it’s the truth
2. No reward for meritocracy
3. No work life balance
4. Partners recruited from foreign law firms don’t get any business
5. Intentional delegation of work when the day ends
6. No respect for punctuality
7. Threat and miserable existence, if you want to quit- Some stoop down to the level of spoiling careers of juniors by 20 years – Loyalty and BS is spoken- for Christ sake its not an army- and all these trolls have shifted jobs many times over themselves.
8. A fake accent and white man’s burden
9. Re-inventing the wheel most often
10. Insult juniors in open areas in office.
11. Over commitment and under delivery to clients.
12. Make sure, associates work every holiday, weekends- some sadistic pleasure.
13. There possibly isn’t enough work to keep people in office late hours throughout the year. They themselves have bad married lives, divorced, no kids and spend their lives in office smoking, chilling etc.
14. Lack of perspective.
15. Zero self respect.
You're clearly doing some kind of qualitative empirical study of the legal profession in India. I'm a little worried about how you're inviting potential interviewees to interview with you. Your advertisement reads: "Sign up to participate in a Harvard Law School study on how the structural characteristics of corporate law firms hinder the growth and development of lawyers." Don't you think that by stating your hypothesis in your advertisement, you're exposing yourself to the risk of criticism- somebody might say that, (1) you're biasing what your respondents will say in the interview, by giving them an idea of what you think, or (2) you're only going to attract respondents who share your view, and not others?
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