While I am happy for Rishad & wish him all the best. Also to the larger NLS community. Everyone’s journey or choice of career in the legal field varies. Surely, people know what they are doing or would like to do.

So many from law firms also have carved out brilliant careers for themselves, so the grapes are not always sour ! Get a life dude …

Be it Menaka Guruswamy. Be it Gopal Shankarnarayan. Be it Rishad Medora. What we are seeing are the long term fruits of people who opted for careers as court litigators, rather than work in law firms. They shunned short term gains doing clerical work in favour of long term gains doing intellectually stimulating work.

People on LI from second-rung colleges, who are dropping law firm recruitment stats and boasting that they are better than NLSIU, should consider this. The top talent does not WANT to join law firms, at least not desi firms.

https://www.barandbench.com/amp/story/news/collegium-recommends-9-advocates-for-appointment-as-calcutta-high-court-judges

Work does not dry up, buddy. Many parties will try to evade obligations or terminate agreements; many will renegotiate.

The clients would try to use the environment to bring down your fee. If you run a practice, it means recoveries may be affected.

If you work for someone, expect lesser bonuses.

We shall see. Hope things will not be as bad as is being predicted.

Putting it bluntly without any sugar coating- Your own misgivings are the result of your current situation. You need to get a hold of your life and priorities and stop looking for excuses for your failures. Identify what is wrong, fix it and work towards your goal giving it your best.

You wish to join a Tier NLU/ Firm whatever....Work for it....time spent wishing is time wasted.

Life chews up slackers and whiners and spits them out.

Personal experience.

Accept, ignore, react negatively or down vote...doesn't matter. The truth cuts and cuts hard! Of course if the LI mod boffins dont publish this then that's another thing.

Hi
I feel I am in a pretty good position to reply to this. I gave CLAT 3 times, first 2 times was getting NLU Sonipat, third time I landed in NALSAR. I was exactly where you were and I just want to tell you one thing. ITS OK. IT WILL WORK OUT.

I know you must have a lot of questions just eating away at you every single second. Just know, that feeling is normal. You'll eventually get over it (or atleast as close to it as one can get) Self-harm will not help you tackle these feelings. Soon you'll get a sense of stability back in your life, that's when it starts to get better.

There's a lot I want to just rant to you, all kinds of tips, all kinds of frustrations, just so many things that would others might not even spend a moment thinking about but hounds those who take double drops, but idt it will help you right now. I just hope this comment that I am leaving here will give you the strength to go on.

I'll still try to answer some of the questions you have asked, but if you still have any more doubts, questions or anything feel free to drop me a mail at burner.mail.9.3.4.1@gmail.com

Are double droppers discriminated or treated differently socially?

While on a surface level the answer is no, there are still some moments where you end up feeling bad about being a double dropper. Most of the times people would not mean it, but the words some people end up saying still hurts a lot. For those moments I only hope that the fact that there are so so so many like us all around us and even all over law colleges become a solace for you. But again most of the time people don't really care, and especially beyond the first year nobody cares about this stuff, everyone is too busy just trying to keep their own lifes normal that they don't have any energy for such stuff.

And as for if you get a good rank this time, will your previous failures still be relevant?
Well, those are your life experiences. They always stay with you, its upto you to not let them become some lingering negativities and to use them for your own benefit.

Now, as someone else in this thread already said, once you are in no opportunities are out of your hand.

I have just finished my second year, and am about to enter the third year, if anyone had told the me that had just gotten out after having written CLAT the second time and knowing that I had absolutely ruined that paper that I will be where I am today, I don't think I would have ever believed that. But life always has mysterious things in store for us. The highs and the lows that I have experienced after all of that just make it all seem just so... in the past. Trust me when I say it's not the end for you, YOU can still make your life into something that you don't regret. That's all that counts in the end.

Wishing things get better for you soon, and you look back to these moments of your life at your lowest points and use it to pick yourself up.

The CAPP test is a Situational Judgement Test (SJT), an SJT is essentially a large personality assessment test.
They put you in different scenarios/ask you questions about your behavioural traits and you have to provide an answer in a couple of different ways (moving a slider/ranking possible ways to respond etc).

The Watson Glaser (WG) is your standard critical thinking test, there's about 5 sections and you'll find a bunch of samples online so won't get into the intricacies here.

There is no useful discourse to have on ranks because there is not some specific cutoff - obviously, the higher the better.

Yes Yes. TLH, with its offices in Jubilee Hills, Hitech City and now, also in Delhi NCR, is going to shut down all other firms, not just in Hyderabad, but all over the country. Such is the might and power of TLH. We are going to put all other firms out of business. All lalas will pack their bags and board the next available train to Mumbai ASAP. Watch out lalas. Even international firms like Baker Mackenzie and HSF will flop miserably, as long as TLH exists, which it will forever, until the end of this world.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/mumbai-news/law-partner-booked-for-sexually-harassing-eight-year-old-daughter-101770146532271.html

Not the same reporter as Mumbai Mirror, obviously. Some guy who covers the crime beat in Mumbai for HT.

Here are the links. We are all lawyers here, we can read between the lines. If these reports are not biased then I dont know. I see a clear pattern here. It is nuanced, but there is a pattern. Tell me I am wrong. He is reporting facts, true. But the pattern?

https://www.mid-day.com/mumbai/mumbai-crime-news/article/mumbai-us-senior-defrauded-of-rs-2-68-cr-by-bank-staff-fir-filed-after-mid-day-report-23586953

https://www.mid-day.com/mumbai/mumbai-crime-news/article/mumbai-75-year-old-american-woman-alleges-rs-2-5-cr-fraud-by-bank-wealth-manager-says-cops-not-filing-fir-23534066

https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/mumbai/cover-story/corporator-sobo-residents-in-green-turf-power-tussle/articleshow/128318322.html

https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/mumbai/sleepless-in-sobo/articleshow/128822030.html

https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/mumbai/cover-story/6-parel-high-rises-move-court-to-save-open-public-space/articleshow/125094762.html

https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/mumbai/encorachers-will-grab-sobo-plot-if-perimeter-isnt-finished/articleshow/130094573.html

For elite class people, it’s either NLSIU/NLUD/NALSAR or Jindal, if they wish to study in India. But many don’t even attempt CLAT and AILET, as it’s so tough and there is a lot of reservation now — caste, domicile, EWS etc. So they just simply try for Jindal. Some go for the double degree JD option.

In fact, children of NLSIU alumni law firm partners are doing this! Their parents were middle class before, but now they are wealthy and elite. So Jindal and study abroad for them.

NLUs are now dominated by lower-middle class and EWS students from small towns. Big demographic change from earlier generations. In fact, part of the tensions at NLSIU pertains to this: elitism-first Sudhir vs equity-first students.

Obviously the Economist would paint such a picture. Are you surprised?

You must know the Economist is a mouthpiece of neoliberal values, which are dying and will take the form of late capitalism and fascism. As it is, the The Economist, comes in nice fancy print, but it is not the least bit credible or unbiased. I say this as a corporate PE, GC, and Capital Markets & M&A Lawyer of 10+ PQE and a reader of society and economics.

Indian legal sector surely evolving. Seems foreign law firms are almost here, given the signs. Interesting times ahead for the law firms…thoughts if any?

https://www.bwlegalworld.com/article/trilegal-appoints-sandeep-ghosh-as-its-first-ceo-606567

The protest has been instigated by rampant misogyny in NLSIU where women hostels have 93 bunk beds, while men hostels only have 18 bunk beds. The cost of the expansion plan of Sudhir is being paid by students, especially women where they are being treated are second class citizens with no clean drinking water, no water supply in washrooms, fan falling off the ceiling, among others. The admin has taken no responsibility or accountability towards these issues and student complaints have largely been left unresolved and ignored.

One would expect 'HARVARD OF THE EAST" to have better facilities than this, but the reality is too grim for the students living here.

https://www.barandbench.com/Law-School/nlsiu-students-overnight-protest-hostel-conditions-water-crisis

https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/bangalore/water-shortage-hostel-overcrowding-trigger-student-protest-at-nlsiu-campus-in-bengaluru/article70972671.ece

Will the admin now 'target' the students?

Has the Karnataka government completely abdicated its responsibility towards this state university?

I've been working since the past 2 years in-house in startups, since the last year I've been sick, had a surgery and on continuous meds, recently I've had multiple panic attacks at work and home. It feels really purposeless to do meaningless work everyday, but it pays the bills. I wish I could take some time out to figure out what I want but it seems like a vague idea and that I might not reach a conclusion afterall. I've always been interested in studying and liked research work, learning about things....the corporate life however is only materially rewarding, I feel no joy in redlining and replying to comments in endless number of agreements everyday. how do I plan to get myself out of this situation? should I go for academia? the money might be less but having panic attacks is a big sign that I'm going against my body for sure.

I'm a 2nd year law student, not a professional. This workflow/system is the result of my laziness and my lack of ability to trawl through material to complete assignments. For the first 3 semesters I was just downloading research papers and feeding them to Claude Sonnet with my writing sample. Output was decent for assignments, but I knew this isn't it, citations can be better, more depth can be covered.

This semester I had a mandatory graded moot and I used SCC Online, AIR and their likes for the first time, and the sheer inefficiency boggled me. This clearly wasn't going to work in the long term, I have 6 semesters left, which comes to around 36 assignments, and I need better. So I started with API reverse engineering. Not a huge problem for me, I have done this in the past, I have worked with documented trading APIs and I have been messing with websites for 3 years now, so I had a very decent working knowledge, knew how stuff works. It isn't particularly difficult either, all you need is a sense of architecture and curiosity; I'm a law student who came from a commerce background with a fascination for computers, so it's not difficult. I kept building on top of that SCC Online MCP, and now the problem is that there's so much to download and index that it is becoming difficult. Even setting up a cron job at this scale is proving to be difficult.

I am actively trying to make the offline corpus bigger, I aim to include as many reports as possible, Gazettes, Parliamentary Debates, laws that were drafted but never passed, articles from public journals in my DB. Right now it just has laws and a few hundred important and major reports. The problem is the majority of the stuff is not organised, so downloading, indexing and organising is a huge task. I hit a wall multiple times and still hit one with every new source, but it is well worth it. I use this solely for assignments, as I was never interested in moots and research papers, so I am not hurrying like my career depends on it.

That said, I am trying to fix all the errors and make the DB public, access to structured data shouldn't be a bottleneck for anyone. I cannot make the MCPs public for obvious reasons. It took me about 2 weeks with a lot of work, around half a dozen all-nighters and once I worked 8 hours straight to put things in perspective, and that's with my background; the part that took time was trying to come up with ways to improve it. From scratch with no background, 2 to 4 hours a week, it should take anyone willing 5 to 6 months. It is a little difficult to make and work with, but it is a complete game-changer for anyone willing to put in the work. Any small law firm or solo lawyer can and should be able to adopt this as well once it is more stable and bigger.

I'm also working on a model interconnect so ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Kimi and Deepseek can debate each other and find flaws in the output. This would strengthen the reasoning capability significantly, and the best part is it would still be cheap af, though it is proving more difficult than I thought.

This is also better than commercial tools because it is not bound by a lot of the institutional stuff they are bound by, liability hedging, locked-in models, fixed pipelines. They also cannot just reverse-engineer APIs, download stuff off the internet and call it a day, and they have to build something sustainable as a business. Since you're paying for the subscription of AI services directly, you get far better value, as the API itself is much costlier, and after the overhead of the company you're either paying very high prices or paying for it in the quality.

The best part about this entire system is that you're always in control of everything, the reasoning capacity, data, model type, costs, the offline corpus, how you want the output to look like. The entire thing is practice-agnostic, you can fetch data, make a database and start it. Plus the custom instructions in CLI are followed much more thoroughly than they are in the web. It is cheap as well, especially if you use opencode go.

If anyone wants to build something like this and needs technical help, feel free to reach out at LIunofficialtechhelp.contact@proton.me. Do not ask me for the MCPs, I won't be sharing them for obvious reasons, and don't try to buy them either, you'll be wasting your time. I can guide you through building your own, but sharing mine crosses a line I'm not willing to cross. I'll be lurking on the thread for a few days as well if anyone has doubts.

So the partners, making money have already left. The cost incurring team has been left behind.

It is becoming more and more difficult to sustain the Mumbai office. The entire Mumbai office is running on the revenue of BJ. Other partners don't generate enough revenue to even pay the rent of Mumbai office.

I heard MS is contemplating harsh decisions like shifting the office to some cheaper locations like Goregaon or Navi Mumbai.

The firm (especially the Mumbai office) is in complete ruins. If you've got a PPO, go for Delhi office or else run away. We don't need more cost at the moment.

I agree. If you look at a not insignificant number of people who are (or were) actually great minds in the world of legal academia, you'll realise how misguided it is, especially in the context of undergraduate students. Dworkin himself, for example, was a law firm man before taking up the jurisprudence chair at Yale. Hart, Dworkin's predecessor for the jurisprudence chair at Oxford, worked with MI5 (Britain's internal security and counterintelligence service) during World War II. Jeff King, who, like Sudhir, was supervised by Paul Craig at Oxford during DPhil (what Oxford calls a PhD), and is now a public law bigwig at UCL, worked as a commercial lawyer in New York for a number of years before taking a DPhil and doing what he does now. Just because many people don't have career changer backgrounds like that and went into academia straight away (including many of the big minds, like Raz, Tarunabh Khaitan), doesn't mean, even if you want your law students to become academics, that you stealth shut other options off.

I think Sudhir K realised this at one time. He even pointed, in a podcast interview he gave, to the United States, which he called the world's best system of legal education. Indeed, I recall him expressly advising people with academic aspirations to get some real world experience prior to going for academia. I am not sure what has caused him to change his mind, frankly, as his own background didn't stop him from giving that genuine advice.

And by the way, all this is coming from someone who has prolifically written on this site in Sudhir's defence against what I considered unfair and baseless criticism of him. It seems like you guys who are the majority on this site, the critics, have finally found a criticism which is convincing and which sticks. Just to note, I still believe, considering India's legal academia environment, that Sudhir is probably the best VC NLS could have had under current circumstances. I am not sure what that says about the general situation. TLDR; sorry for the slightly long exposition. Take it as a sign of exactly how disappointed I am at what is happening in NLS.

Stop this nonsense propaganda!! You people are upset that a VC with world-class qualifications, who hires top notch alumni, is imposing high standards. Not handing out high grades like candy. Not rewarding essays written by ChatGPT.

Please shift and go to a tier 2 college run by mediocre people, if that is how you feel.

He is having such a post because best universities in the world have one, and it looks good for optics and checklist. He believes that if a student is given good and rigorous academic training, then they should be about to get a job without any further support. As mentioned by someone else, you may choose to disagree with him, but you can't fault him for inconsistency. He's made this very clear from day one. If people join the university during his tenure despite that and then have different expectations from the admin, then he isn't one to be blamed.

A huge slab of the ceiling fell on a toilet last year (the toilet was shattered into pieces, same thing happened today, and a hostel lift with people inside it fell freely for 2 floors 15 hours later. A huge concrete slab fell from the third floor of the under construction New Academic Block. I’ll be leaving this place in 2 weeks, really hope I make it. All of this is available on different forms online for verification purposes.

I think the only exception to this sort of is if your Uni just doesn’t provide ranks. My alumni got into Oxford for BCL because (1) he had like 4 years of work exp and a bunch of publications when he applied + (2) our Uni simply didn’t provide ranks, so they relied on LoRs etc to decipher his placement.

True. But the cabal’s days are numbered with the TMC losing. They will soon find that the governing bodies will be filled with RW people, while people like Sanjeev Sanyal and Swapan Dasgupta will be handling education policy.

They will also learn that some of the left-liberal professors they admire will change to saffron. 😆 Because man by nature is a rational and self-interested animal.

Cap Markets is just a well. Resist the temptation. Since you're from CLC, your litigation connects will help you phenomenally once you're in your 40s. Slog it out in litigation for a few years if money is not a concern. If it is, still work with a disputes practice of a bigger firm for a couple of years and then switch to chamber.

However weird the title may sound, please give this a read. I might sound childish or stupid but please excuse me as I genuinely need to vent this out and get any help along the way. Thank you.

So, I got a rank of 7XX and got into HNLU but am now having second thoughts about going there. There are primarily two reasons for that:

1. I chose Humanities in class 12th for my passion's sake but then I looked at the bleak financial opportunities (especially in BA History which I so much wanted to pursue) and decided that after school, I would turn my mind to the money part, even if it meant letting it trump my passion a bit. This was how I found out about law, through a random video that denoted the average packages in the top firms. While it was made clear there only that one had to be from the top NLUs to have a good chance of getting in, I was relieved to find at least some way to reach that spot. However, now that I have gotten HNLU in my second attempt, I notice two feelings - a. Even after two attempts, I could only get HNLU, and b. I ended up swaying away from why I initially entered this field. If I would give up both my interest and chances to land those particular jobs, what is the point?

2. Recent posts and talk about the autocratic/high-handed administration, which is constantly coming in the way of students (for eg. the mooting fund allocation changes), and most importantly, placements. I saw that in the past year, AZB was the only T1 to come to campus and took 3-4 people, the rest were PPOs (and I would think that they are considerably tougher to land as your pool grows much larger compared to the campus placement scene). Also, even in its good years, it managed to get only a few T1s. So, the chances aren't that high. Another thing I noticed is that in order to calculate their placements, just take NLUJ's figures and divide it by 2, that roughly works out to be the correct number.

Also, I get that this was maybe just a bad year and I'll be graduating 5 years from now, but what if that's a bad year too? What will I do then? At least in the top 6, even in the bad days, I won't lose access to firms rather only my chances of landing at each would get lesser (i.e. the positions might reduce).

At this point, I don't even know what I am doing with my life. I hate myself for getting allotted HNLU and whenever my parents speak about how I got into here, I feel myself slouching and just ducking in my blanket of shame and guilt. Never in the worst of my days, had I thought about going into HNLU or any T2 for that matter. I used to get consistent 90+ (at least 85+) scores in mocks and got scores good enough for getting NALSAR at least, in the previous year papers except for 2021.

I've also heard that even the workload and work quality is differentiated based upon which college the associate is from (might be baloney, don't know). I just don't like to be associated with the college. That T2 tag just haunts me everyday. Almost all of these months have been spent on sleepless nights, as I have tried to make sense of going here. When I initially thought of this idea to just totally drop and attempt till I get a T1, I felt such an ease like I hadn't felt before in the months since the results came out.

But then my mind turned on and I noticed that I was getting a bit too emotional thinking about this. While I did plan for preparing for both CUET and CLAT/AILET if I were to give the exam next time and sort out for either my passion or financial goals, I just couldn't exactly trust myself with another attempt. In the past, I gave countless hours to critical reasoning and got comfortable in it but then those analytical reasoning questions came, made my head go blank and just like that, it all worked out for nothing. I saw certain facts/articles in newspapers or somewhere randomly that I didn't pay so much heed as to actually remember them, they came in the exam. While I will never back down from this opinion that the Consortium just took its syllabus and threw it out the window, I also blame myself for those oversights. However, it's just that, how am I going to find those oversights this time around, how will I stop my mind freezing in the exam hall, will anything that I will prepare for actually come in the exam (for instance, I religiously solved LegalEdge and LPT mocks, and it's without a doubt that I can say that they helped me jacksh*t).

There is so much uncertainty, it feels like gambling, hoping my preparation aligns with the paper. I also feel so scared of the possibility of me messing up the GK section once again or getting stuck at that one AR question again. I might just go all in and do everything, but then you can't do everything as that's only human, but then those things that I couldn't do, would come in the exam.

At the end, I just want to say that I don't know what I am going to do now. The college just doesn't ignite anything within me. I have swayed away from my intention of getting into this field in the first place. I am "sure" that something would again get changed up in the next attempt and I will still not get a good college. Maybe I might, and that is what keeps the cycle going. One more thing, is that I don't want to take a partial drop as it's impossible that your CGPA doesn't get affected and in the unfortunate situation of not clearing CLAT with a desired rank, what will one do with that messed up CGPA (also the first semester matters the most, as it most greatly affects the overall average of future semesters).

P.S. - I know that I may not be cut out for the top stuff, that's a reality that I am willing to accept if that be the case, but to always change the playing field, test such different things that I didn't even have any idea of getting assessed has made me sulky. Plus the opportunities are so vastly differentiated that I feel like going for the game of chance is a good enough strategy (attempt till you get a T1). I feel extremely disappointed in myself for going to a "good enough" college or settling for that matter. Also, I know that I might not even end up going for corporate but closing it from the onset feels a bit foolhardy.

P.P.S. - Please don't crash out on me, I know this might seem like ragebait but I apologise if I said anything out of line or hurt any feelings, I had no such intentions. I hope you understand and provide me your valuable suggestions. Thank you.