Analysis
Analysis
When Chief Justice of India S.H. Kapadia started his term in May 2010 it was widely reported that he didn’t take the traditional May-June court vacation but worked through it, aiming to look at ways of reducing the time it takes to hear cases and making the Supreme Court administration more efficient.
Analysis
In today’s edition of Mint: Indian lawyers have it pretty good when compared with the average citizen, of whom only 8% are positive about their jobs—as a Gallup survey revealed last week. Nevertheless, the corporate law profession faces a crisis of confidence.
Analysis
In today’s edition of Mint: Legally India reveals the conundrum of how legal liability insurance has managed to catch on among India’s bigger law firms, despite no one being able to remember any lawyer ever getting sued for negligent advice.
Analysis
The ruling in the Chennai writ petition was hailed as pragmatic for solving the nearly two-year-old deadlock foreign firms were in. But frankly it is likely to continue exposing the deficiencies of the 1961 Advocates Act in dealing with modern-day India. And it could possibly plunge a number of industries into a world of pain via the Bar Council of India (BCI).
Analysis
Until last Wednesday, an explosive 161-page document prepared by four judges was gathering dust in the office of Nalsar Hyderabad vice chancellor (VC) Veer Singh for nearly four months. Few, if any, had read it and most faculty and students claimed they were unaware even of its existence or any details.
The story of that report is Nalsar’s alone. But this is also a story of academic power struggles, law school management and students caught in between, that will have near-universal parallels in many Indian law schools.
Analysis
The Vodafone tax case will not just be remembered for being one of the biggest in Indian history, but also for cementing the reputations of a raft of lawyers at the top of their game and others who are rapidly getting there.
Click here to read about how lawyers like Harish Salve, Rohinton Nariman, Dutt Menon Dunmorrsett (DMD) and others fought the case, exclusively in today’s Mint.
Analysis
Exclusive: A few years ago, Indian lawyers who took a top LLM in the US were inundated with job offers from prestigious US and international law firms. Many accepted. But in 2011 only five out of 60 students got such a ticket. Have $70,000 US LLMs just become a way for colleges to cash in on Indian students? Find out why the Brazilians seem to fare better than the Indians.
Analysis
Madhava Menon’s national law school experiment of 1986 may have failed to pull hundreds of Indian law schools out of mediocrity but it has brought newfound respect to legal education, reports Mint today. Critics complain that the national law schools have mostly benefited corporate law but this may not be their fault. While no NLS grads have so far made it to senior counsel rank, some are making their mark in litigation.
Analysis
Exclusive in today’s Mint: Revealing two years of research, over 20 interviews with current and former lawyers, and never-read-before insider details and accounts, read the most definitive and balanced account published so far of Fox Mandal Delhi’s financial woes and how the merger between Fox and Little & Co Mumbai unravelled.
Analysis
Mint - easily India’s best quality business daily - will now feature cutting-edge legal industry news and analysis in its pages every second Friday under an exclusive new content partnership with Legally India.
In today’s Mint edition, Legally India editor Kian Ganz’s colum demystifies India’s legal market: Despite India’s fairly average legal population density every lawyer here has to make do with only $1.4m of GDP. This, it turns out, is the lowest figure in both developed and developing legal markets. Click here to read the column on this, pseudo lawyers and more.
Please comment below or on Mint with suggestions for future topics or stories worth covering.
Also in today’s Mint: all-new research on salary progression at law firms, as well as how and why law firm salaries have risen so much in the last five years.
Analysis
Law firms pay lawyers with six years of experience up to around Rs 30 lakh per annum in Mumbai, revealed analysis of data collected in Legally India’s associate survey, as first published in Mint today.
Analysis
Legally India editor Kian Ganz will now blog regularly in The Lawyer magazine’s new blogs section about the Indian legal landscape. Here is the first post.
By far the personal question that I get asked the most by lawyers in India and abroad is: “Why India?” You might want to ask A&O, CC, Links or Freshfields or the rest of the pack the same question.
Analysis
Eleven law firms, including six of India’s largest, Ashoka and the UK’s former attorney general Lord Peter Goldsmith QC have discussed how to develop a pro bono culture in Indian law firms as i-Probono, a UK not-for-profit and online portal seeking to connect lawyers to social sector projects, will launch in India to encourage law firms to do that which is “long overdue”.
Analysis
The Bar Council of India’s (BCI) counter-affidavit filed in the AK Balaji Chennai case against 31 foreign law firms said that the BCI has decided not to relax the restrictions prohibiting foreign lawyers from practising and that the issue raised by the writ was “no longer res integra” because it had been settled in the 2009 Lawyers Collective case.
Legally India understands that the BCI’s thinking is that internal disparities at the Indian bar need to be eradicated through reform before making any decision on foreign firms.
Analysis
What drives successful lawyers and graduates to forge a career path in civil society despite myriad challenges and the financial hit? And why are there not more of them? We ask them to find out.
Analysis
In the last two decades the Delhi and Mumbai High Courts appointed only three female senior counsel each out of a total of 122 and 81 new senior advocate designations awarded by the courts reveals Legally India’s exclusive year-on-year analysis of senior counsel elevations in the country’s top two high courts.
But the senior prospects at the bar are actually bleak for both sexes.