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.

[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.](http://www.livemint.com/2012/02/02222413/How-India8217s-biggest-tax.html)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

Expert academic witnesses Vikramaditya Khanna and Sandeep Parekh locked horns with law firm JSA-instructed and ex-CJI Ahmadi’s testimony in the lead-up to yesterday’s $125m settlement before a New York court, US dockets reveal.

The Indian criminal justice system is near to breaking point as 300,000 people or 70 per cent of India’s prison population consists of those awaiting trial facing a morass of judicial delays, according to a research paper discussing the current state of the Indian criminal justice delivery system.

Exclusive: Activist lawyer Prashanth Bhushan has condemned media ownership and its consequences after secret wiretap tapes that were released as part of the 2G scam case, which contained alleged conversations between well-known publicist Nira Radia and India’s rich, powerful and the Fourth Estate.

State bar councils are planning to hold regional bar exams for each state, as the holding of the all India bar exam has turned into a political circus between the Bar Council of India (BCI), its chairman and the state bar councils. Meanwhile, the BCI will meet in Chennai this weekend (20 November), probably without BCI chairman Gopal Subramanium.

Exclusive: The Supreme Court may have set the stage for the next round of proceedings in the All India Bar Exam challenges after completing the summoning process but certainty has continued to elude thousands of law graduates, as only two out of six anti-exam petitioners are still in active pursuit of the case while the other four have become absentee litigants for most intents and purposes.

Hindu political organisation Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha has filed a caveat in the Supreme Court to prevent any party to the dispute from seeking an ex-parte order in appealing against the Allahabad High Court’s 30 September decision on the Ayodhya title dispute matter.

Who are the players in the saga around legal market liberalisation? And do those in favour actually care enough to make a difference? Legally India talks to the opposing factions and finds out why no progress has been made - and if any is around the corner.

Amarchand & Mangaldas, India’s biggest law firm, has all the trappings of a family-run enterprise including sibling rivalry. The Shroff brothers must quickly set their house in order, argues Forbes India magazine’s Shloka Nath.