Obviously Mamata will appoint a servile ex-judge who will whitewash her government’s role. Speaks volumes that he is also on the NUJS EC and exemplified the decay of the institutions. When Menon, MP Singh and BS Chimni were heading NUJS, the ex-judges on the EC were legends: Ruma Pal, Chittatosh Mookherjee etc.

The SJA has continued to look the other way and engage in pointless culture wars.

Justice Ashim Ray will head up the committee constituted by the CM to inquire into the mess up and fix responsibility. Justice Ray has been a veteran EC member and was part of several inquiries initiated by the EC against PIB and his acolytes. He also headed up various inquiries etc during NKC tenure too. Wonder what happened to those inquiries.

SJA if you are done playing and wagging like a L...G could you please make these inquiry reports available to GB?

Choose an area of your interest (This domain can also be your major in PhD later). Research and write research papers. If you can get it published in a scopus journal, that's even better. Do internships in NGOs, community foundations, govenment organizations, etc.
Do your LLM and then your PhD after graduating

Talk to your best credentialed and most productive professors. Also to guest faculty who are fully time academics whom you admire. LL.M., Ph.D., fellowships and teaching experience but not necessarily in that order. You need good mentors first because recommendations and good advice are everything at your stage.

No. This is at least not a requirement across the board. I am sure that a few people expect juniors to have worked in a firm for a few years but not all do. My advice to you would be to intern under the person whose chamber you want to join. Impress them during your internship and you will at least have a decent shot at getting a referral for a junior position from them, if not at joining their chamber itself.

No words…

⚖️💰🇮🇳🫡

https://m.economictimes.com/news/india/sandesara-brothers-deposit-rs-5100-cr-total-recovery-nearly-double-of-rs-5383-cr-fraud/amp_articleshow/125914809.cms

Good article summarising Tharoor's dilemma - https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/refusing-savarkar-award-exposes-shashi-tharoors-dilemma-3828706

I am a mid academic student at a tier 2 law school. But I can work better than most of my batchmates. Work harder and far more productively. But if CGPA is a factor to just decide who's better then i will always stay at a disdvangtage.

Furthermore, please if seniors on LI would be able to share names of firms which look for work>grades it will be really good.

I’m considering applying to her team, but I have heard some serious complaints from a few people within. Apparently, she has genuine anger issues and takes unnecessary personal jabs. Could you please let me know about the salary, the team culture, and whether she and Ashutosh work together or separately?

I too feel have the same issue. Been only 3 months into practice and I am not getting good at drafting, almost all the time by boss tells me that the draft were not good, while I convey everything there is.

Moderator can you pin this? Maybe some reply will really help a few of us out here.

I am to graduate in the coming May from a T2 NLU. Since last year, I have been doing judicial internships; before that, I was with corporate teams in different law firms. This month, I am interning at the chamber of a senior advocate. The associates here are really good, although there is not much substantial drafting (most of the time, it is only research and brief making), yet they give me a few applications to draft, so that I can learn something, and after each submission, the unfortunate review has been that I don't write well, there are various grammatical mistakes and that the manner in which I have drafted will take me nowhere. This has now become a huge cause of diffidence for me.

I feel the past few years of making projects using ChatGPT, and before that using Quillbot, have shown their colours. Moreover, since so many internships, I was never directly involved in drafting, and hence, now the realisation is coming to me this late, just before my graduation. I am really worried. I have seen the final drafts, edited by my seniors, and there is a huge difference in articulation and the manner of writing. Their sentence construction is too precise, and the words used are ordinary, yet, either in an extraordinary manner or in a very precise manner, which, after reading, makes me realise that I too could have used this basic word, which I have known of for so many years. I have also tried following the sentence construction and words as used in judgments, to make my drafts a little bit better, but never been successful.

The real issue is that when I draft something, I try to brainstorm a better way of writing the sentence, but at that juncture, I reach a pit stop. It's like I can't think further than that. I really want to excel in litigation, but I need some real tips and help from anyone who can guide me on improving drafting. Never in the last 5 years had I ever thought that just before my graduation, the only thing I would be worried about was my bad drafting.

From what I understand, they are still allowed to give "legal advice" wrt. an issue. The legal advice would include DD and drafting, but now, as the amended 9A says and how I interpret it, the vetting of these documents needs to be done by the MB/IB, and that vetting cannot be outsourced. So now every MB engaging a counsel needs to have an ECM execution team to give a green light to the same, which was originally practised by top Indian banks like Kotak/JM/Axis, etc.

(This is my interpretation; I do not know for a fact.)

The pay is ▮▮▮ (example 14 LPA (fixed) for someone with 5 years experience) and the work is basic commerical contracts. You'll end up reviewing POs and NDAs for most part of the day. There's hardly any employment work even though the firm claims to have 'expertise' in the subject area. ▮▮▮ The bonus is a joke and the firm will come with very novel reasons to withhold the same - such as "we like your work but there are some challenges (with no explanation of what exactly are those)". Do not fall for any variable amount that is mentioned in the contract because pretty much the whole of it will not be paid. ▮▮▮ There's no HR nor an HR policy. Leaves are completely dependent on the whims of the newly minted partner and some people who have been in the firm for a long time. Same goes for the so called work from home policy which was only applicable for the Partners and the seniors associates. ▮▮▮

BTW, there's no substitute to asking King's directly. I know messaging the unis through their portals can be convoluted, pretty jank and irritating, however they are the ones who wrote the offer letter, and they are the ones who can give you the best answer. Explain precisely what you have here to them and ask them directly. Regardless of what you think of what I've said in my previous comment about your grade averages, and regardless of what anyone else says, ask King's directly,. Just to be safe and to make sure.

How is this "consolidated percentage" calculated? Is it a weighted average of your grades over the years? If so, that is likely to be what they are looking for. As you are doing a five-year degree, I think your best bet (from my own experience with various UK universities) would be to assume that in their calculation, each year counts for 20% of your grade (even if that's not the case according to your uni in India). So you would want to be obtaining a 67% or above as your average every year, and that needs to include your final year (when those grades come).

1. The part about the top NLU graduates being the main part of the Indian student demographic in the good (and even mediocre) LLM programmes in Britain and the U.S. is true, though there are people from places like University of Delhi and ILS Law College as well. Indeed, the first blind person from India to get the Rhodes Scholarship (world's oldest international postgraduate scholarship to study graduate degrees at Oxford for two years) was a law graduate from Nagpur University.

2. However, (1) a UK LLM is very unlikely (chances almost zero) to get you into a U.S. law firm's U.S. practice, even if you had amazing contacts (one of the things that U.S. law firms look for from foreign lawyers), unless your amazing contacts were like really top-notch ones, preferably from both India and the UK (which would mean you'd need high levels of experience in both jurisdictions) and/or India and a third jurisdiction, and/or India, the UK and a third jurisdiction that wasn't India, the UK or the U.S. (like Singapore); and (2) a U.S. LLM, even if you were to get into one, with or without funding, is very unlikely to be the trigger that leads to a U.S. job. That market does not favour LLM graduates (not like the UK does, either). And they know enough about India by now to have formed opinions on our law schools. So if you were to go to a non-T1 NLU in India (read: not having attended NLSIU, NALSAR, NLUD or NUJS), that would be very unlikely to help your prospects either.

1. My personal suggestion: Don't move at this point. Just grit your teeth and stick it out for another up to four to five years. I know it's hard, but the chance that you'll get good fruit out of this is much higher.

2. At the same time: An anecdotal example for you to consider (from the London market). One of my best friends is a lawyer in Britain (having attended university there straight after school) who worked at a prominent Anglo-American law firm's London office for just under six years (the amount of time required under current British immigration law to go from immigrant to citizen), and then moved in-house. This individual worked in the securitisation practice of the law firm and moved to a prominent investment bank, where she has been working for under a year (it is one of the top players). The major difference between her CV and yours (unless you have omitted relevant information) is likely to be that she worked at the Mainland Europe office of a second prominent investment bank on secondment from her law firm for three months, early in her career.

It's confirmed that it was leaked. Take a look at just this video:

https://youtu.be/BuYcTUsz5X8?si=6MYwwZthsObZ4f5_

In fact, some students have already reached out to solicitors to speak to Gopal Sankaranarayanan

Fantastic person, lawyer and boss to work with. Very balanced - highly organised so you now how to pace yourself, clear about deliverables, and very considerate. She will actually look out for you and help while respectfully ensuring you work hard and learn. Trust me that's a rarity in the T1s

The problem with NLU Assam is not location. IIT Guwahati is on par with topmost IITs. The reasons are:

1. No visionary VC till date. ▮▮▮

2. ▮▮▮ faculty mostly recruited from north east itself and probably ▮▮▮ or referrals ▮▮▮

3. Student body didn’t work hard in initial year nor revolted enough to throw the ▮▮▮ VCs out

Read Modern Legal Drafting by Peter Butt and Richard Castle, as well as The Devil's Advocate by Iain Morley KC. Should be good enough in the beginning. Real experience will fill in any gaps in your knowledge. All the best to you! God knows we need competent litigators in this country.

The truth is you don't need any.

If you want to excel in legal drafting, the only thing that matters is your command over language. You get an idea of the typical terms to use, how to structure it, etc., based on the case files you would read during the course of your usual work otherwise. For language, I'd say just start reading books. Fiction or non-fiction, doesn't matter. If you want to go with read law-related books, there have been plenty of threads on LI previously.

On the other hand, if you want to improve your knowledge of the law itself, just pick up the book(s) & bare act(s) and read it. There is no substitute for this. No course can help you the way books can. So, for eg, if you're in civil litigation, just read up a good book on civil procedure cover-to-cover. Suggestions for these have also been previously posted on LI.

If you live in MP, especially in a city with a bench of the HC, then it is really a no-brainer. You should practice before the MP HC. You will likely save quite a bit of money on rent, especially if you own property but even otherwise due to the lower cost of living. Given the pittance which is given to juniors for the first few years, best to stay in MP.

What percentage of successful counsels have political connections? Is it possible to be successful in Delhi without having ANY political connections?

I’m thinking of the following examples:

1. A couple of ASGs, one of whom has been into political activism since college ▮▮▮. Non-political people with the same background have not progressed like them.

2. A couple of ▮▮▮ who got designated as seniors. Totally undeserved.

3. Two youngish lawyers who became standing counsels for a certain state government ▮▮▮.

I’m asking only about Delhi because of the nature of the city. Every conversation in Delhi begins with “I was playing golf with Robert Vadra the other day”, or “ Piyush Goyal is my dad’s college friend.” 🙄