I posted this as a comment, but it makes more sense to have a separate post since this is important.

@Kian, have you complied with the new IT Rules?

Have you challenged the constitutionality (haven't read about it anywhere)?

Please do provide us with an update.

If you are fully complying with the new regime, you have violated your promise (made to us users) regarding guaranteed confidentiality. Anonymity no longer exists and the harmless cookie you had us store (which you had explained in detail a long time back in some comment) is now a disaster in waiting.

You will get a lot of recommendations for lawyers (if you wish to file, and also seek recommendations here). I am sure that you will also find a lot of talented advocates here who would be more than willing to help.

One can never equate the powers of the judiciary and the executive. The executive will always be the most powerful organ in day to day functioning. People from PCS-J background can always argue that a lower judiciary member has more power based on some misplaced notion of what real life power can mean. They often use these arguments to support their claim:

1. The CJM/JMFC can summon the DM/SP in his court but not vice-versa,
2. The executive can only implement Parliamentary law but it is courts which have the power to strike them down.

I would simply say that these arguments are very bookish in nature and do not reflect the ground realities whatsoever for the following reasons:

1. Area of influence / Discretion - The judicial members have no authority outside the courtroom and they usually struggle to get things done through contacts even for themselves (let alone others). The scope of discretion for a judicial member is extremely limited and they can step in only once a matter actually reaches a court. Unless someone wants to live in their own bubble, a common citizen is not really concerned about the DJ/CJM/JMFC of a district and they would rather be much more mindful of a IAS/IPS/IRS officer.

A DM/SP (even an Additional DM/ Deputy SP) is the nodal officer of the Central/State Government for that district and has enormous discretion in administering the district. Basically, they have the entire state machinery to themselves (for use/misuse) for practically doing anything since they control each and every sphere of policy implementation.

Again, this is simply a function of the organ you are working for - the executive or the judiciary. This is in no way meant to belittle the judiciary - the judiciary has its own function to perform and it's a very important organ of the government but one should be clear about what they are getting into.

2. Status - Political interference is a sad reality for Civil Services posts. However, this is not to say that the judicial officers don't face any pressure.
a) Often, you will see that many lawyers in district courts don't respect the authority of judicial officers (I have heard of instances where lawyers have simply hurled abuses at a JMFC / CJM and challenged their authority in open court).
b) Many well off parties don't respect the authority of even district judges (especially in civil cases) and advocates openly tell them they can pass whatever order they want and they will appeal against the order in higher courts.

Now, if we are comparing the worst outcome, there is either the option of listening to abuses from a MP / state / central minister or some random advocate of a district court. I guess I will go with the former option.

3. Postings- I think someone has already covered this point above very precisely. In the judiciary, unless you reach the position of a HC judge, you will always get remote postings. However, with civil services, that's not true. If you are an IAS/IPS, you can get urban postings after first 7-8 years (if you are IRS - then even sooner). While this is obviously a matter of personal preference, it cannot be denied that urban areas have more facilities and infrastructure than rural areas (health, education, leisure and entertainment etc.).

4. Work profile - As someone mentioned above, the work profile of a civil servant is much more varied and dynamic than a judge. Again, this is because of the inherent nature of the executive organ. It is supposed to undertake all the residual functions in administering a country. You have the opportunity to go on deputation to other departments or international organisations like UN, World Bank etc. On the other hand, the scope of a PCS-J member is limited to courtroom procedure and adjudication.

5. It's about the journey - People are claiming here that people passing the PCS J examination will become a HC judge by the age of 50-55 (which is completely debatable with hardly any evidence). Assuming it is true, the 25 years taken to reach that level by wading through the lower judiciary isn't worth it (see first four points on why that is so). Civil servants, on the other hand have a time based promotion (which may be a flawed policy but it is what it is) and each post performs a different function if you consider it in terms of a supply chain. The role of a DM is vastly different from a joint secretary and you will learn different things such as policy implementation, formulation at different stages of life. The journey to a Secretary is very fulfilling in each role and it's not like people are simply biding their time to get something better like it may be for PCS-J members.

Conclusion- There is a reason why the judiciary has not been able to the attract the brightest people getting into law. Unless an All India Judicial Services is created and modelled along the lines of IAS/IPS, the lower judiciary will unfortunately be something that people settle for if they are not able to clear the Civil Services Examination.

1. Have you saved enough money to last without an acceptable income for more than a year?

2. Are you prepared to spend a couple of years without enough / acceptable case load and without giving in to anxiety?

3. Do you have a network of friends / former colleagues who can refer work or involve you in ongoing matters?

4. Have you attained enough skills and confidence to advise and appear without having to rely on a senior?

If the answer to these questions is Yes, you may consider going independent now. Some oldies will ask you where your office is.. but most clients do not care anymore.

I have learnt this over last 9 years working at law firms. I am a PA at one of the T1s now, started at a T3-4. Hard code it in your thought process.

(1) It will not matter (at all) to your future employer. All they care about is whether you can do their job or not. Any half decent/ professional firm will treat you like that - a professional. If its not treating you like that/ prying too much - dont work for that team, interview for a different partner. If you are good, you will get hired (and rise with time).

(2) Time to send that stern email - followed by FB/LI/Insta/whatever. Fight for whats rightfully yours, without any guilt or fear. If you decide to drop it, then drop it at your will (time vs. opportunity cost). But not because you are scared.

Possibilities:

- You were not able to secure ANY internship (this is not ideal)
- You worked on writing, learning and extra-curricular activities that strengthened your interest area and helped you network (if you can take five days of concentration and build a project for the community - this would have positive impact)
- You pick up a single internship in corp now. Do it. Lot of remote out there.
- You speak to 10 seniors who have cracked day zero, implement the advice. Cold text and request for guidance. Only college seniors.
- behave like a learner, not selfish, listen when seniors speak. Ask specific questions and clarifications. Ask for their resources to learn.
- You become technical god - learn.

Listen, one is never to old and never too early. Pace out your life, if you are stress free and healthy, it is going to be a long life.

Also, you cannot say you don't know 'how' your peers got internship, that's no excuse. Just complement them for hustling and being driven to put themselves out and getting the internships. Because there are a lot of them. If you are from a top university, huge number of them.

If you want to be an assistant professor, you'll obviously have to multiple other things.

But you are already a step ahead - since you have already figured out that you want to work as a contractual faculty with a side practice - which is kind of the best of both worlds.

A foreign LLM with 4 years PQE can make you a guest lecturer at almost any college. I have seniors with credentials less than that (1 year PQE + foreign LLM) who are working as guest lecturers at NALSAR, NUJS and JGLS. So, even good law colleges will hire you.

The only problem will be career growth. As a guest lecturer, you will mostly be paid on a per class basis and your per month salary would be between 30k-60k in government colleges. I know people in JGLS who work as RA-cum-guest faculty in Jindal and make about a lakh but that's about it.

You will not be able to aspire to top professor level salaries between 1.5 lakh to 2 lakhs even after 10 years of experience unless you get the UGC requirements (NET, PhD, fixed number of research papers etc.).

But since your focus is having a side practice, I'd advise you not to go down the formal route. Once you take up a permanent position, you give up your license to practice (as advocates cannot be employees). Then you can only teach. So, if money with a little bit of academia is your focus (instead of just becoming known as a great academic), then the path you have decided is the right one.

Just have faith in yourself and follow your dreams! I'm sure you will succeed.

Well since there are people calling out for a different perspective from Work From Home is best here is a shot -

Working from home which I agree is more efficient from an individual work perspective, is not ideal from a management perspective. There are multiple reasons for that, but primarily good managers (i.e. partners in the law firm context) excel in creating a collegial environment in the middle of intensely stressful work conditions. The bad managers on the other hand will make your life hell whether you work from home or office.

It's the little things the good managers do which makes all the difference, the conversations you have while waiting for a call to start, or while taking a break working on something together, or in the car ride to the meeting, which cannot be replaced by work from home. It gives managers an opportunity for informal bond building and sometimes even mentoring. There is a lot of relationship and 'bond' building which happens in between the times work happens.

This opportunity for good managers, is effectively taken away from WFH. The consequence is the team which was being managed fine till WFH started, is now showing mental fatigue, burnouts, and resignations, because the current crop of good managers learnt how to manage their team well in offline mode, never remotely. Now in order to remain good managers they will have to learn how to achieve that remotely, but there are continuing doubts within these managers as to whether similar bonds and environments are even possible on a remote basis.

Recently, there has been too much emphasis on savings and investment. Be it YouTube or LegallyIndia, everyone has become a guru in investing these days. To be fair, it's a great development - people becoming more and more financially literate and conscious. People are investing right from their first salary.

However, at the same time, I think there has been an overemphasis on "SAVE EARLY, INVEST HEAVILY and RETIRE SOON" philosophy. Life is not a like a treadmill where you can run for 10 years and then live off your fitness for the next 30 years. I know the unsustainability of corporate jobs and lifestyles have made us think that way but it really isn't so.

I'm 39 years old and I can tell you none of my friends have retired after 10-15 years of law firm life. Because the reason is you just cannot live without a purpose. Living off 20 lakhs that you earn as interest/profit from your portfolio with nothing else to do in life, may sound great but it isn't.

So focus your twenties on experiences, finding your niche. Take risks, spend your money, live for experiences. You may not make and save a lot of money but you'll find something that'll make you want to live your life. At that point, money won't be a concern because once you find that sweet spot - either you will make windfall money or just love your work enough that you wouldn't want to retire.

Remember, your 20-30s are the best years of your life. Save but don't sacrifice them completely in the dreams of securing a freer future which may never arrive.

Biggest impediment to WFH or even partial WFH are law firm partners who do little else but micromanage your physical presence. My partner is always worried I'm either napping or watching movies during WFH even though my billables now are higher than they were pre-covid and our revenues continue to go up. Like every other field, boomers singlehandedly hold back progress

Been there and done that again. Tbh, there will be a little difficulty adjusting the litigation lifestyle for 1-2 years. Post that when cases start closing incrementally, the satisfaction is immense and very genuine!

The biggest changes you need to make peace with for a smooth transition:
1. The addiction of paycheck on 30th of the month;
2. Getting up on some days and not having work and actually having to take the initiative to find work (which you've slowly given up while working in a law firm); and
3. Daily disappointments.

To elaborate on point 1 and 2: People say litigation is hard work etc. But more than the 14 hour days, it's the "nothing to do" days you have to learn to deal with more. Sometimes, there will be entire weeks/months when all you did was just filed a receipt. That is the scarier part after you come out of a law firm where everyday is a standard 12-16 hours. But assuming you have a good enough savings at this stage to pad you up, you can easily sail through it financially.

To elaborate on point 3: In law firm, you are pretty much in the senior rung now. Associates work for you, partners rely on you. Unless there is a very major fuck up, no partner will shout down a PA/PAD. You're treated very professionally. But in litigation, you'll have judges who'll destroy your self esteem everyday - either by not listening to you, by dismissing you or giving some random ass order. Don't expect to "win" cases. As long as you're appearing and you're making money, that is the definition of success in litigation.

So yeah buddy, just prepare yourself mentally, take the plunge and enjoy the ride. And do not evaluate yourself until for the next 2 years. It's fine as long as you are making some incremental progress every month. Life is too short to spend in a cubicle. Go be the reason you did law for!

Well said. A few more thoughts:

1. Understand more about finance and investing. The more you learn (and practice it even with the smallest of amounts!), the more financially secure you will eventually become in the coming years. And not being penniless usually does ward off serious depression more often than not. I spent wayyy too much time complaining about my 'low' salary that has been haphazardly distributed among high end restaurants and bars across SoBo in the past decade. It could instead have been in the stock market or in MFs! Go figure.

2. Focus on the work that is in front of you instead of thinking about the future. And execute the immediate deliverables with care and perfection. In the corporate law space, whether thats a 3-page NDA or the execution versions of the SSA / SHA in a large transaction, just apply the same yardstick of focus. Don't worry about the pipeline for the next month or the next year. The anxiety that lies in the question, "What next.." has destroyed a lot of law careers. That's no exaggeration.

3. Clean your clothes cupboard and study area as often as you can, and especially when you are completely stressed or depressed. Just keep a mental note of your mood before and after this exercise and see for yourself what happens.

4. Read the newspapers (like the ET, FE, BS) instead of the internet news. The latter is an endless wormhole of bad news, disasters, catastrophe's, whining columnists and 'upcoming' actors / stars finding innovative ways to hide their joblessness. All of that is bound to negatively skew your outlook. The former (i.e. the paper) does less damage to your outlook on life.

5. NOTE: this applies when the pandemic is 'over' - Friday, Saturday and any other long weekend socialising you do should be confined to folks outside law or those who aren't in direct competition with what you do. Most lawyer social events (formal and informal) are a drag and listening to some boastful sloth blowing his own trumpet on some despairingly pedestrian advice he gave an unsuspecting client is as bad as spending hours on Social Media. And the alcohol (whether paid or free) is largely useless in times like those...

6. NOTE - this applies to folks who are working in their offices (and not WFH) - stay away from the cigarette breaks with the 'usual suspects' / purveyors of office gossip. Other than gathering pointless grapevine that's anyway going to reach your ears on your desk (hey its the grapevine, remember?), it's a consistently mundane line of crap that should be given no headspace.

7. Keep planning a trip / holiday / outing / social event (whatever makes you happy outside of law) for each month. There should be something to look forward to at the end of the month. Even a simple evening with an old friend or a visit to a favourite restaurant is good enough. In fact if the actual event is cancelled / a letdown / a washout / no-show-because-boss-wailed-like-a-baby-an-hour-before, the planning and anticipation of that will anyway distract you from negative feelings of life being unfair. Basically find a way to keep yourself busy and occupied.

Enjoi.

It is extremely difficult to break into litigation field. Frankly at 40ish you should already have a regular stream of work coming to you from Tribunals (service matters, telecom, SEBI, CCI), High Courts and Trial Courts which you don’t. It will now be extremely difficult to get that for you.

Second, a lot depends on the relationships right from a notary to clerk in court to babus in offices, NCLT and NCLAT etc. You will have to start from ground zero.

Irrespective to the above if you have fire in your belly to become a litigator nothing can stop you. But be prepared to first 5 years of struggle and “deep deep deep” frustration and humiliation and disrespect. After 5 years who knows? You could be a failure or someone good in making.

Your grey hair will be worth more once you step into a courtroom. Camaraderie at the Bar is one of the most amazing gifts - there is always a friend to speak to, a mentor to listen to. You will be Master of your time on most days. That is worth a bank account of its own. No more calling other people Sir. Its time to be out in the world and of value to it.

Consider partnering with a litigating lawyer who would be willing to introduce you to the practice. You can use your current knowledge to add a transactional side to his practice. Hire juniors and treat them better than you were treated.

The secret to happiness is that it is right here, right now. Not a distant goal or a daydream. Life is too short for what ifs.

Hi my dudes - I think the question asked by the OP dude should be rephrased to "How many hours a day do you work". Because that has a direct impact on how much time of the 24 hours are left for you to eat food, say hi to partner/ spouse and sleep. I'll give you my example as i don't waste my time looking at anyone else, or the general rule that is followed in in other teams.

1. During covid, (at least 4 days in a week) my seniors start messaging me by the time they have had their breakfast or before they do, asking that i get some research/ email/ deliverable done/ cleared/ seduced.

2. Average of 3 to 4 zoom calls a day, with constant phone calls and watsapp messages through the day, which by default increases the amount of time i would otherwise need to finish something. So if i need to make a standard DD requisition list that would take me 2 hours, i spend 3 hours.

3. on average i submit stuff, send emails and close things by 8. but 3 times a week, i have to send emails and review work after 8 depending on how urgent my otherwise incompetent senior thinks things are. or if the partner drops a message on the group with regards to an artificial urgency to get things done. im done by 10:30.

The above does not apply for filing weeks/ weekends, during which work is 20 hours a day.

So on a good normal day, i expect to sleep 6 - 7 hours. I would like to get in 8 hours but because i need the money, and am scared of losing my job or pissing off a senior who i know is not worth the dime he/ she is paid, i get panic attacks from 7 AM to check email and phone to make sure i haven't missed a call, email or message.

Dont be like me dudes. Switch off your work phone post 8 PM and only turn it on only post 9 AM in the morning. There is literally a 8 percent chance that they will fire you. Unless you work in capital markets like me. Enough monkeys out there to replace me and my entire team.

Let me speak from my experience both at Oxford and London, and with friends at both places (unlike other "experts" at LI who think they know everything in their second year of law school).

- Both UK and US professors can have good or bad relationships their students. It depends on the personalities of both the professor and the students. Most UK professors met with students over a drink at the pub/cafe a few times. US professors do the same. Formal lunches and dinners are also organised.

- UK classes are often smaller because they are LLM only and there are specialised electives. There are also special LLM tutorials held in the UK.

- Pedagogically (big word for a second-year kid), the difference pertains mainly to jurisdictions covered. In a UK LLM pre-Brexit there would be focus on both UK and EU law, not so much US. It's the reverse in the US.

Bottom line: All the US/UK law schools in the top 50 of the QS law rankings are absolutely top notch in quality and brand value. Singapore and Australia too. Many outside the top 50 are also excellent in certain fields, like SOAS.

I always wondered why they said follow your passion and now I get it. In most of the professions that pay well you are going to have to put in a lot of hours and it is helps if your job and passion are the same. Think about a cricketer or musician or even a lawyer who is genuinely interested in law, I don't think they ever whine about work-life balance and why would they for their work is their life. Most of the guys here in law are just in for the money it pays not because they enjoy it thoroughly. The question should've rather been how do I identify something that I enjoy so much that I don't mind it taking over my life. When you figure that out you're all set till then make your hobby finding your passion :/

Quite a few, actually. Most firms (tier-1 and some tier-2 ones) have realised their exposure owing to the pandemic and know now that they ought to hire freshers to keep up with increasing demand and the high attrition. Currently, firms are interviewing for PPOs for the 2022 batch and by the end of this month is when the Day Zero-s begin at the higher NLUs.
Good luck if you're in the race! :)

To all A0's to A4's peers;

Our resignation doesn't mean anything (cost of replacement is there) for the firm, they may even keep long bonds in the future and maybe withhold bonuses to be paid only after completion of 3 to 4 years. Law Firms are inherently stressful jobs- not just in India- across the world (Tell about any country where a big law associate doesn't put in atlest 12 hours a day ?), that's why many of your talented (probably more than you) peers gave Judiciary or went into Academia or non-law.

Where is everyone who is resigning going to? Another Tier 1 or 2 firm with even much horrible working hours. Only when Partners or SA's resign it makes any difference. When an A0 or even up to A2 resigns, there are thousand law students willing to replace them at any time.

Even when an A2 to A5 resigns, there are thousands (at least hundreds) of Tier 3 or 4 and Commercial Chambers Associates willing to replace us. You might have seen a lot of folks from Tier 3 or smaller firms joining Tier 1 firms these days, they are desperate just to be there.

Naah.......

These 2 are easy options for you. Canada has something like a series of tests (NCA Exams- Law), which you have to take to become a solicitor (1 year) You can't go to Quebec thou. New Zealand also it is possible to convert your Indian Law Degree.

But trust me, the pay is so low in Canada and even NZ, if you are going to firms in Bay Street it will be manageable, but almost impossible to get unless you have worked in a Tier 1 Law Firm in India.

Even some T1/2 A3's in India (AZB, CAM, Wadia Gandhy & likes) who migrated to Canada are doing low-paying immigration filing and compliance work. Canada is not an international business hub like London and it has a small economy unlike the US, so does the work. You may even start your career for C$30 K per year (almost poverty wages)

It will take 10 years for you to settle in as a lawyer in Canada. After 10 years, even if you start at a small firm you can make CA$150K (good life in the suburbs) Is it worth it----- ask yourself.

If you already have a good life/future in India (Tier 1/2 or even 3/4, Good Chambers/Seniors, or a Govt job, I won't say Canada and NZ are worth it for you.

What I did -
1. Don't benchmark yourself with your peers/batchmates/friends.
2. Delete IG/FB/LinkedIn
3. Do some exercise/sports
4. If you live with fam, spend more time together. If you live otherwise, get in your partner or non-competing friend in.
5. Do something that you've brushed under the carpet for long (YT channel, blog, entrepreneurial venture, sing whatever)
6. Focus on work
7. Talk to confidants and try getting to the underlying reason behind anxiety.

Life isn't unfair. It never is. In fact, life is the fairest of them all, the early you accept, the better for you.

Most measures I did were temp, once I got back up, IG LinkedIn don't bother me anymore.

And yes, sab theek ho jayega. Acho ke sath acha hi hota hai. Take care my friend.

Before taking up any form of exercise or diet, do visit a health specialist to determine whether you actually need to gain weight in order to be fit. Just do push ups, pull ups, dips, squats(bodyweight and weighted, jump rope regularly etc. )All the stuff you learnt through your PT teacher in school. That should be sufficient to maintain physical health in most cases, and remedy weight imbalances, if any. You can try gyms as well, but personally don't find it a sustainable way to maintain health and fitness, plus it can get redundant, boring, and can lead to hemmorhoids due to lifting excessive weight, with back and knee problems considering most gyms in India have a bodybuilder type coaching approach. Play a sport if you can. Do some yoga, swimming. Anything sustainable which you can carry on to your 40s and later years.

Do you know what you can do for clients which most lawyers don't do, letting people in your circle know that you are a lawyer? I know it is tacky but if I were in your shoes, I would call up every friend, relative, neighbour, archenemy, everyone on my phone list and tell them how I am going on a new exciting phase and would really appreciate it if they can send some work my way.

Also, reach out to all lawyers in your circle, your friends in a law firm are routinely asked by their known for legal advice and since they won't be taking it up, better they send it your way than to someone else. A friend just told me yesterday that she has been an independent lawyer in Delhi for the past 8-10 months. If she had told me earlier, I could have sent a cheque bounce case her way. People are busy with their lives don't expect them to magically get to know that you are practising now. I know it's spammy, tacky but it gets the ball rolling. If there are folks whom you are not sure of calling text them but make sure the text is personalized, not asking you to create a new message for everyone but at least their initials in your message so that they feel obliged to reply. Remember, the less the effort you put into it, the lesser are the chances they would feel obliged to help.

Make sure you are part of every free listing Justdial, Sulekha, UrbanClap, Lawrato etc. Also, set up yourself on Google Maps as a local business listing, do it at your residential address if you are not sure you will continue working at your relative's place for too long.

Start spending time on LinkedIn and Facebook, and by spending time, I don't mean endlessly scrolling through the mess. Start posting quality content, adding relevant people to your network, and engage with other's content. Yes, Facebook is deliberate over there, Facebook could get you as much work as LinkedIn, if not more, if you leverage it right.

That's my two cents for now. Hope that helps.

Just over the course of the last few days:

1. Office space in Bombay is being doubled and L&L will now occupy the entire 20th floor at Indiabulls.
Source- https://www.barandbench.com/news/corporate/ll-partners-mumbai-office-double-physical-space-new-hires

2. Three new partners have been hired - Piyush Mishra, Abhishek Mathur, and Kunal Mehra. I don't about the other two but Piyush Mishra has a stellar practice - has been partner for about 10-11 years now and did some good work at AZB's B&F practice in Mumbai.

Source - https://www.barandbench.com/news/corporate/abhishek-mathur-rejoins-ll-as-partner ; https://www.barandbench.com/news/corporate/dua-associates-partner-kunal-mehra-to-join-ll-partners;https://www.barandbench.com/news/corporate/piyush-mishra-leaves-azb-partners-rejoin-ll-partners

3. A number of associates & partners at L&L who were previously team MS are equivocating now perhaps because of (1) MS's reputation as a difficult taskmaster (2) creating a lucrative practice from scratch will require a hard slog (3) MS is not diluting as much equity as was expected (4) MS hasn't been able to poach big talent laterally (5) Not many clients are willing to abandon L&L for MS as of now.

As someone working in a specialized PIL area and with somewhat high-level work exp. in IL, it is quite difficult to break into a career in international law (especially outside India). Let me put this through my own experience in somewhat realistic terms:

1. The first issue is that the PIL core taught in India is often really inadequate. When you try to launch yourself in a PIL career, you come to realize the sheer competence gap that exists between what you are taught and what you need to know/understand/apply when a task is handed to you. Yes, IL mooting will help you bridge that gap but then again these moot problems are merely enactment of "semi-fictional disputes" and - trust me - disputes is one of the smaller circles of PIL. My basic point is that conceptual wholeness is lacking what you are taught and moots do not help you bridge it because in narrowing down on certain IL issues, you tend to lose sight of actual policy issues due to which these "disputes" may never actually arise. . Law schools focusing on dispute resolution is natural but to imbibe the idea that IL is about disputes is odd. But then again, that's my own view.

2. Academia v. non-Academia. IL careers that often get highlighted are academic ones. If you can get over the conceptual hurdles in the first issue then academia is a good area of work in IL - and depending on your stars you may land a job outside or can even come back and teach in India. But a certain level of expertise is needed when you are seeking a career in the academy or outside. Outside, the work is either State-oriented work (you supply competence and advice to States on disputes, negotiations) or non-State work (working with law firms, IGs, NGOs etc.). But all this is a question of competence (and if you are thinking of working abroad, of course, visa). To gain a foothold in these work areas you need to have a credible standing which at early stages is a product of work experience or your higher studies. IL studies in India will usually not prepare you for this work (maybe SAU might? no idea)

3. Competence. You might be catching the main point of this answer here because this is the biggest issue in my view. You have to build your competence in this area. IL has gotten increasingly specialized over the years and - in my view - will continue to get even more specialized. The onus is double for Indian students looking for IL careers: they have to master the conceptual basics (which you did not get at LLB levels) and then you also have to garner a degree of specialization to differentiate yourself from not only your Indian peers but also those from world over. Only then are you "competitively" there in terms of a career in IL.

4. Luck. Cannot stress on this enough. IL careers - especially in State-oriented work and IOs and IGs - is all about luck. Even if you reach the level of competence I outlined above, when you apply, things depend very highly on chance.

5. You mentioned work experience. Prior work experience is pretty much standard now I believe. It is extremely rare (at least now) for me to have found someone who made their career in IL without having a considerable degree of work experience in IL (be it in negotiations, policy, disputes etc.). But the worry is how do you even go about finding good work experience in IL? There is no one doing "only IL" work in India. (If they are, its often unpaid). And then again, if you are gaining work experience in Indian IL setups, the rate at which you develop competence might be slow if you simply rely on their work to teach you. That way working in IL in India is also a challenge because much of the time you are building your competence on your own (making mistakes and learning, which is time-taking).

6. LLM/Masters. Yes, you can simply go for a masters and get it all over with an LLM degree but that's not the same thing I feel. Everyone says that "work experience matters for your LLM applications" but rarely do they explain what that even means. It orients not only your application but it shows that you have a degree of understanding in the subject matter - not to the colleges but to your prospective employers. So yes, you can directly do an LLM, general or specialist, and look for jobs but you will be in a job market where people have had years long worth of work experience in State-oriented work or non-state. That puts you in a situation you perhaps didn't want to be in but that's another issue. Which is why when you say "careers in IL", I want to mention that work experience ought to be valued above any degree. Smallest of work experiences matter but the bigger the better.

Above all that however, learn on the go. Learn from the people you work under, paid or unpaid. Don't think they'll teach you IL like Mr. Salve sits and talks about one case at the ICJ but pick up on their attributes. Pick up how they tackled their career trajectory. Use that experience.

7. Satisfaction, pay and comfort. My own idea of PIL work is that it is really satisfying. The moving parts of the global political economy is split open right in front of your eyes and you are engaged in stretching your bandwidth to grasp it all. (It is, however, tough to estimate what impact your work has/will have) But it is extremely satisfying to work in this field.

Pay. The bugbear (?) of all nascent IL careers. You can count on one hand the number of IOs which pay their interns. From that you can understand how much unpaid work goes on in this field. But that's the price of the field nowadays. Once you break in, however, it gets better I believe. State-work pays depending on the level and, of course, the country you work with. Being Indian doesn't necessarily mean that you have to work with India only. Smaller nations often pick up people who are available and of proven competence. IOs and IGOs come with smarter pays, better career plans but yes, your work might get less exciting and your career may not progress meaningfully.

But hey! you made a career out of it, didn't you? If you want things to be perpetually be exciting then negotiations is your playground. Advising and negotiating on behalf of States is thrilling stuff. But such posts are a combination of the things I have talked about earlier: vacancy, competence, and (of course) luck!

Hope this gives some insights. As mountainously difficult as it looks, its perhaps still doable if you work towards figuring it all out. This is all the clarity I have today but some time back even I was asking the same questions. I know I might have missed out on things that you probably wanted answers to but I am happy to take any follow-up questions.

Depends on what "worth it" means to you. There are several trajectories, I outline some below:

1. Academia - it is getting more and more niche, as in all things: so you may want to think of a specialisation. You need to have a top academic record, and do a good job on your doctorate. Some Indians have done exceedingly well in this sphere, for example Lavanya Rajamani is an established leader.

2. Bar/Arbitration/Advocacy in a disputes context - Incredibly difficult, as mentioned in another comment. The best bet may be to either qualify at the English Bar and choose an international law focussed set (but many times, this involves doing commercial work as well: the Bar/disputes firms tends to have people who do commercial as well as investment arbitrations); and then some may choose to focus on public international law related issues. But this is over a career of 4 decades; you will become a "PIL barrister" only in the last decade... The other option of going down this route is to join a PIL focussed firm (Volterra Fietta etc.) but there would be very limited vacancies and getting in is very much a matter of luck/timing.

3. IOs and Consultancy - tied to academia: if you want to go down this route, getting there through the academic route is probably the way to do it. Again: in terms of role models - Priya Pillai is someone whose career you might want to study.

4. "Niche" practice involving international law: The main area is (other than BIT arbitrations and then leading on to public intl. law arbitration/Hague) seems to be international tax. But beware: it is only at the leading edge of this practice area that you get your real PIL interface. You need to be at the absolute top of your game - otherwise, you will end up as a tax lawyer only connected in a very ancillary manner to PIL (you will cite VCLT a few times a year!) than do any deep PIL work. But at the top edge - you can really advance the frontiers of international tax by applying hardcore PIL concepts. Philip Baker is at the forefront - Porus Kaka is one of the very few Indians in the top league in this area. There are also tax focussed IOs (OECD, for instance) which do important work. Tax is an especially interesting case study for PIL lawyers in terms of expanding notions of jurisdiction in tax, etc. Lots going on at the moment. But you need to have a really deep interest in tax law, rather than just PIL.

In any event, if you are young and/or have time to explore, you might want to do a well regarded postgrad degree, a doctorate under a renowned supervisor, and also do things like Summer Courses at Hague, apply for judicial clerkships with international tribunals, think of working as arbitral secretaries, and then figure out which of the routes works best.

Is it worth it? Really depends on the opportunity cost and on the intrinsic worth to you of working on PIL.

I’ve worked at a tech MNC and at a tier 1 law firm. The learning curve at the law firm was comparatively steep for sure (strictly in terms of legal skills acquired on the job). At a junior level, if you’re at the right company, you can get a lot of exposure and get hands on experience quite early on. You learn a lot of how to manage people, speak to internal folks without all the legalese while still getting your point across, and just soft skills in general which are equally if not more important as you grow in the profession.

Hours wise - really depends. I was working as an M&A lawyer inhouse and had to clock in US hours and do india hours too when a deal was in full swing. But my team was supportive and the work environment was far from toxic. I wanted to work to get things done seamlessly. I cannot say that about my experience at the tier 1. The hours were brutal as expected but the culture made the hours 10x worse. I resented every minute of it.

Take your pick and choose wisely! If you find a team at a law firm that’s even a little bit empathetic, hold on tight and for the love of god don’t jump ship for “marquee deal partners” or a few extra lakhs in your bank account.

@ Shameerpet Clowning:
I just read your rejoinders. Let me try and respond to some of your concerns. Like all institutional decisions, we have had to consider both principled and practical reasons in this context. Your main argument is that starting the Integrated Programme in Management (IPM) will lead to a dilution of the BA,LLB programme and the larger institutional identity. It is difficult to agree with these arguments.

As I have already outlined earlier, additional hostel spaces are nearly complete and plans for faculty hiring are already in place. By the end of 2021, we will have 600 more slots available for accommodating students and the NALSAR Executive Council (EC) has already sanctioned 10 new teaching positions in respect of the new 5 year BBA-MBA programme. These will be over and above the existing resources that are devoted to the 5 year BA, LLB programme, which has been around for 23 years and will continue to be the main offering. NALSAR is lucky to have a 50 acre campus which can easily accommodate the expanded infrastructure and a higher number of students, which is projected to reach 1200 by AY 2025-2026.

If we consider the student experiences on campus, the presence of 350+ management students by 2025-2026 is not going to interfere with the established activities and pursuits of the law students. Even with the 2 year MBA programme having been run since 2013-2014, the range of course offerings for the BALLB and LLM students has in fact been growing every year, with a numerical majority among them being devoted to public law and socio-legal themes. If you do not believe this, I can share a semester-by-semester listing of elective courses taught between 2013-2021. There is no reason to claim that institutional resources such as availability of faculty or infrastructure will somehow be diverted away from the law programmes. If anything else, the additional revenue generated from the BBA-MBA programme will enable more investments, both in faculty hiring and campus management. As I have stated earlier, hiring full-time faculty for the core BBA-MBA subjects will definitely have spill-over benefits for the law students. The existing pool of MBA teachers has already delivered electives in areas such as financial services, accounting and organisational behaviour. These offerings will only expand with more people joining over the next 2-3 years to deliver the BBA-MBA programme.

The intake for the 5 year BA,LLB has been increased in an incremental manner over the last 6 years. To be specific, the intake was increased from 80 to 120 in AY 2014-2015, and then it went up to 144 in AY 2020-21. Since 2015, we have been running 2 sections for all the mandatory courses in the BA,LLB course. As you suggest, one option was to opt for a further increase in the BA,LLB intake, just as other NLUs have increased their intake to 180 (with 3 sections) and some private universities have gone further. On balance, we found that it would be much harder to add sufficient faculty numbers quickly enough to sustain 3-4 sections, especially since the pool of competent law teachers is quite limited and we have our own limitations in terms of the pay-scales offered as a public institution. In comparison, we have already been running a MBA programme for 8 years, and it is relatively easier to scale up the Department of Management Studies, since there is a much larger pool of people available for this field.

The larger objective of improving the institution's revenue stream is self-evident. I don't think that anyone is hiding that. Given the uncertainty about the quantum of state government grants in the coming years, it became necessary to foreground considerations of financial stability. Coming to the specific numbers, the annual fees for the BBA-MBA programme is Rs. 4.2 Lakhs (Rs. 3 Lakhs being the tuition fees), which is indeed higher than the current fees for the BA,LLB students which is around Rs. 2.8 Lakhs per annum. However, this amount is lower than what the IIMs are charging for their respective IPM programmes, which ranges between Rs. 6-7 Lakhs per annum. So NALSAR is offering a middle-range option and it is quite misleading to use phrases such as 'cash-grab'. If anything else, we will deliver a programme that will be cheaper than a vast majority of business schools in the country. We are of course pursuing other methods of increasing the institution's revenue stream, most prominently by expanding the range of distance education programmes. In AY 2020-2021, we had nearly 1,700 enrolments for the various distance education programmes. This number will hopefully grow with more diplomas being added for AY 2021-2022.

You make a very good point in terms of suggesting other options. Some of us have been talking about the possibility of offering M.A. programmes in public policy or socio-legal studies, given the emergence of such programmes at institutions such as APU, NLSIU and TISS-Mumbai over the last decade. I agree with you that such postgraduate options will have closer synergies with legal studies and might also help us in attracting research-oriented faculty members. We are actively considering these possibilities but it will require some consensus-building as well as strategic faculty hiring in the coming years. There is also the option of starting a 3 year LL.B. programme, but there are pros and cons to that as well. With our expanded hostel capacity, we will have surplus space to accommodate another 150-200 full-time students, even after accounting for the 5 intakes in the BBA-MBA programme. So the postgraduate options can be considered a few years down the line.

I guess those who studied at NALSAR during the 2000s will have stronger feelings about its brand being focused on law. However, institutions do need to change with time, especially in a context where state support for higher education is inadequate and likely to decline further. The National Education Policy of 2020 explicitly states that single-faculty institutions need to expand their range. So that overall context should be kept in mind.

@ Shameerpet Clowning: I am responding to your observations since I have been helping our colleagues in spreading the word about the new Integrated Programme in Management (IPM). It is quite alright to express scepticism, but one should also consider the views of those who may see things differently.

First, let us be clear about the numbers for the 2021 intake. The CLAT Brochure specifies that the intake for the BA, LLB (Hons) programme is 144 seats and for the LL.M. programme it is 72 seats. The intake for the new BBA-MBA programme is 72 seats. So assuming that all seats are filled and the intake numbers do not change till 2025, we will have 792 law students and 360 management students on campus by AY 2025-2026. I am not sure how you jumped to the projection about the relative percentages.

Second, it is completely baseless to claim that starting this new programme will somehow undermine or dilute the delivery of the existing 5 year BA, LLB programme. For starters, the students in the new BBA-MBA programme will not compete for jobs in the corporate legal sector. In fact, the revenue stream generated by this programme will help the law students directly, most evidently by broadening the pool of fee-paying full-time students and thereby controlling the fee-structures. That has also been the experience with the 2 year MBA programme, whose collections have in fact helped NALSAR in maintaining financial stability over the last few years.

Thirdly, The Department of Management Studies (DoMS) will anchor this new programme and faculty hiring will be done in a targeted manner in accordance with the needs of the programme. Several courses in the BBA component that are related to legal subjects and the social sciences can be easily delivered by the existing faculty members. Newer hires will help us in diversifying the academic offerings, including those for elective courses directed at the BA,LLB and LLM students. We are already looking at prospective hires for areas such as Economic History, Behavioural Psychology and Statistics. So this new programme will actually enhance the available pool of faculty resources instead of curtailing it.

Fourth, the infrastructure for accommodating more students on campus is being built. There are two new hostel blocks (with 150 rooms each) which are nearing completion and will be ready for use in a few months. Once the pandemic subsides, they can accommodate 600 students over and above the existing hostel capacity for 800 students. We have already added several classrooms in recent years and more can be built as per requirements in the coming years.

In terms of the applicant pool, the UG CLAT has been getting more than 60,000 applicants in recent years, while the IPM programmes get around 35,000 applicants with some overlaps with the former. So there is sufficient interest to sustain this programme. My colleagues have shared that several hundred applications have already come in, so the programme will definitely start in AY 2021-2022.

It really depends. Big4s typically have 3-4 major verticals - audit, tax, advisory, risk etc. They also have a fairly small internal legal team into which lawyers are recruited. The internal legal team is akin to an in-house role and nothing much else. Predictably, audit will never hire lawyers. Tax, sometimes does, though very rarely. The other teams are mostly CAs, MBAs, engineers and the like. Almost no lawyers.

As far as pay goes, depends on which city you live in. There are minor differences. Plus, you will be a salaried employee, which means a large chunk of your salary gets deducted towards tax and PF. So, what you get in hand may not be fancy like law firm salaries. Fresher salaries may be Rs.9-10 lacs before tax.

If you are joining a Big4 to work alongside CAs say in tax, I would caution you against it. While we lawyers especially those from NLUs have a very high opinion about ourselves, even first rank-gold medal kids from the topmost law schools in the country are wayyyyy behind in terms of knowledge, understanding of the law or preparedness to work. After a 3 year articleship and the CA exams, even the most average CA fresher who worked with a decent small time chartered accountant, knows much more than you do! So, unless you are willing to be humiliated, be astounded by your severe lack of knowledge, and be humble to accept that you are not a gift of god because you graduated from a NLU, do not go to a Big4.

Having said that if you do manage to get a foothold and determined to go ahead, you can be assured that it's a much, much better learning experience because you are likely to get a stronger grip of the law, especially tax, company law, FEMA, GST etc. And, you will definitely develop excellent excel and accountancy skills, which most lawyers lack.

Alternatively, consider Big4 best friend law firms which i've heard have the typical law firm culture.

As far as work hours go, it really depends on the kind of team/partner you work with. Some days can be really as bad as law firm hours, especially if you are involved in say tax return filing, M&A etc.

I spent nearly 4 years with law firms (tier-1) and then nearly 5 years in-house. My years in-house were tons more interesting, productive and enriching than my time at firms. I guess I was fortunate in working for a company where the lawyers weren't simply paper-pushers. I picked up my best lawyering skills in-house - where you can't simply issue an opinion saying "No, it can't be done" - you have to find a way to get it done and see it through to execution and beyond.
For the first couple years I think I made significantly less than my law firm peers (given tax structure + the limitations of pay bands etc) but it was corrected in time and in the last year or so I was pretty happy with my pay. Still probably significantly less than a law firm, but it was the best trade-off. I worked roughly 10-7.30 (only a few exceptions), did little to no grunt work, and literally never had a boring day.
Eventually I quit to do my own thing, but look back on the job with lots of appreciation.

Not much to say about my law firm days - pretty bog standard, all nighters, toxic bosses kinda stuff. Most importantly I felt zero connection to the work and environment. It was a good training ground in terms of what never to settle for.

It's great if you're able to find a healthy balance. Terribly unhealthy otherwise. Of course, things are different now, but on-campus, since you get to spend so much time with your s/o without any particular restrictions, it's very easy to develop unhealthy co-dependencies. I've seen people lose all their friends and their social circles because they refused to respect the other relationships in their life apart from that with their s/o. Because of this, many a times, even professionally, couples end up working only with each other and are unable to actually make the most of the exposure that NLUs offer in terms of meeting different people and expanding your horizons. This ultimately culminates in an inability to retain individuality, and acute difficulties being alone at home away from your s/o during internship breaks, or the current situation that we find ourselves in.
That being said, if you are able to navigate boundaries and keep the relationship balanced, a relationship in law school can end up being one of the best things in your life. You'll have a support system like no other. Since law school brings out the literal worst in you, if your relationship survives that, you know you'll make it in any situation. The most important thing, as in any relationship, is to be a complete person by yourself, and avoid any sort of dependency.

https://consortiumofnlus.ac.in/clat-2021/notifications/Revised-NLSIU-Admission-Notification-AY_2021-22.pdf

You seem to have completely missed this, Kian. This was released 2 days ago, it seems.

I hope you are all well. We have seen law firms (especially top of the rung, now Tier-1s) grow tremendously over the last decade since India has been hot property for gradual FDI induction (yes, I am aware 2021 is different, media and partial FDI numbers can lie by overestimating things) along with a healthy amount of M&A activity over this period. All this, I assume, has created an amazing amount of transactional/business work for firms generally and now, with the markets hitting ever new heights means that things haven't been better for big Indian law firms than the past decade or half.

Now, there is constant chatter of US raising the interest rates and the impact/effect that it would have on emerging markets such as India (see ex-RBI gov Subbarao's piece here: https://www.ft.com/content/30652b8d-8aff-444a-a703-fd8582058c69). A downturn in the markets and the economy in terms of credit and its general well-being (besides what is already happening in terms of unemployment and crisis) is a troubling but very real possibility for the times ahead. (recall 2013, here: https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-india-of-2013-is-not-the-india-of-1991/article5068745.ece and here: https://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/aug/19/india-financial-crisis-rupee-stock-markets)

I want to understand (since we have all only seen good times): what does this mean for the law firms on the road ahead? How do/will they cope with this downturn? (Is it time to for low hiring? loss of jobs (sorry to bring it up)?) What is it like at a law-firm in an economic downturn of this scale? Is the general doom and gloom of today going to keep on going for the months ahead? What do these large scale changes to the essentials of fiscal policy mean for law firm business?

Answering purely on the financially rewarding part:

Assuming you take a year or two off after law school to prepare for CAT or get work experience, and subsequently you go for a 2 year MBA program at the top IIMs, at the age of 26-27 you graduate from the IIM with a top consulting job (say McKinsey, BCG etc.) then you will start with a salary of 24 - 36 lacs.

At 4 years PQE at a law firm, if you become an SA you will be earning approx. 30 lacs.
At 3 years PQE (A3), you will be earning approx. 22-25 lacs.

Also, keep in mind that salaries at IIMs and IITs are generally inflated (https://bit.ly/3gOqAuO). A "40 lacs package at Microsoft" by a top IIT student actually means some 20 lacs of cash at the end of the year. In case of law firms, a 30 lacs package assuming average bonus will pay you at least 25 lacs.

Further, remember that you have lost out on 2 years of salary + paid 25 lacs as course fees during your MBA. So, that's a set back of about 40 lacs even though you are graduating with roughly the same salary.

So, yes - few years after graduation, the ROI of (NLU + top law firm job) is definitely better than ROI of (IIM + top consulting job). If you plan to quit the corporate life within 5-10 years and live a peaceful life - a top law firm job makes more sense.

BUT, the benefits of a top MBA over law will kick in after that. Top equity partners (not including promoter/founding partner level equity) make somewhere in the range of 5-7 crores. Fresh equity partners fall in the range of 2-4 crores. And mind you, this comes after 20 years of PQE.

On the other hand, if you leverage your MBA properly, join the right companies, make the right transitions, you can end up as a CEO after 20 years of PQE. In which case, only the sky/negotiation is the limit in terms of your salary. Plus, the range of career options at your disposable will be too vast as compared to a lawyer.

So, yes an MBA will be more beneficial if you look at a 20-30 year career horizon. The caveats are of course - not everyone who graduates from an IIM becomes a CEO or a millionaire. It is a risk you will have to take. And you will have to keep yourself at the top of your game even into your late 50s.

On the other hand, a law firm job will give you great returns for a decently rich and smooth life. Your career and salary transition will be mostly linear without many big rises or falls.

Hey Everyone,

Thank you so much for taking out the time to reply to my query. I do have a better understanding and clarity of things now. Anxiety can be real and dreadful and I fight with it each day. But no, I will not give up on my dreams before giving it a shot. Someone has rightly mentioned above, don't take a call without trying and failing. I know many of us face this and let me tell all of you, including myself, that it will get better and we will lead a peaceful life. I am happy to know that instead of taking each other down, you all shared your very relevant experiences with me and I genuinely appreciate it.

Sending positive vibes and love to everyone!

Generally, most firms like CAM/SAM do not offer PPOs straight after a 1-month internship. If they like the intern and want to possibly recruit him/her in the future, they offer him/her a callback. The intern might come back again to intern with the same team in his/her next vacation and if they again like him/her, they offer a PPO. A callback can be considered as an offer for an Assessment Internship.

Hey

My close friend who is a 2018 graduate from a private law school, faced similar anxiety issues, he had to occasionally visit hospitals during internship. He also happens to be a corporate lawyer working in a tier 1 firm. This is his story.

Post completion of law school, despite being aware of his health issues, he wanted to work in corporate law practice. He anticipated the stress in a law firm setup, having had attacks occasionally during internships. Upon graduation, he struggled to score a decent opportunity as all private law students do.

Through rigorous networking an applying, he scored an opportunity with an ex-Trilegal lawyer running his own show. The firm had crazy work hours, till 12 most nights. As is with this anxiety attacks, it came out of nowhere for him (or so we perceive). First six months were fine, but post that he started experiencing issues. He spoke to the partner, health is paramount, and resigned.

Went home for a month. Felt better and decided to have another go at his dream, got in touch with a couple of friends, found opportunity in passion domain, scored an opportunity with a tier-1 firm in Bombay. He had stellar communication skills plus good articulation. He was not upfront during interview about his condition. He disclosed it post closing the job. During last two years, his teammates have been nice and supportive. He has had limited issues and has grown immensely. The job has worked out for him.

As someone in similar situation like you, he is an example of things being possible and you not being discouraged. Don't take a call without trying and failing.

As a person who has seen him grow, he tells me that the things working for him are: (i) time management and 'deep work': this helps him concentrate and get things done with minimum mistakes. He sets the expectations of timeline clear before taking on tasks (often requesting extended timelines), communicates with the senior regularly. He has set a process to ensure deliverables meet expectations and are cleared of his to do list in the shortest timeline. (ii) he spends two hours each week in looking back at his work, organising files, taking notes of his mistakes and ideas. The nature of his work being repetitive, he has developed models that now give him perfect perspective and road map to deal with future workload. (iii) he spends considerable time finding productivity hacks, automation tools, and mostly reading up everything under the sun on his practice areas.

He is a victim of staffing, and has seen his share of inconsiderate teams. His process in (i) above has helped him immensely to manage timelines.

To be honest, I have improved 1000x in my job because of him. This is a tribute post and I am going to send this to him.

Don't join.

I have seen the healthiest struggle at firms. Or join a small Tier 3 Office-where you make terms clear; there also they will make you work, hours are long- but pressure is less-pay is also less.

Have seen law school toppers (overall) leaving firms to take up less stressful jobs. If anyone is telling a Tier 1/2 job isn't stressful. They are either lying or haven't worked at one. The first 10 years are really stressful. Even if you make a partner your hours may get reduced, but not the stress and accountability.

I am writing my personal experience of having practiced corporate law in a Tier I law firm and then moving to a Tier II city to be around my parents. I practice full time:

A. Background
1. I took a break to spend sometime with my folks with the intention to rejoin the same law firm after a few months.
2. I hadn't quit the firm and worked remotely. After few months, I decided to quit and completed the handover.
3. I stayed home longer than I expected and realized that a majority of successful people, including people practicing law don't necessarily work in law firms. Similarly, a large majority of population works in unorganized/ unstructured setup and lead a fulfilling life. Thus, began exploring my options, if I wanted to continue living with my parents in a Tier II town.

B. Before you decide to come back:
1. Must have a mortgage free home in your hometown. If not, hang in there for a couple of years and buy an apartment/ piece of land, which should not cost you more than Rs. 55 lakhs in a small city. Having your own office is an advantage (even a single room in your home should be good enough);
2. Stay mortgage free and keep enough money in your bank account to buy health insurance and car insurance for next 5 years; and some money to afford a meal when you step out with your new found friend circle;
3. I assume you stay in a district, which has a district court and not merely an outlying court;

B.Vocation;
4. Outsourced corporate advisory work is possible, but litigation is the traditional route and easy to set up. I am not suggesting that rendering services remotely is a bad idea, but I am not the best person to comment;
5. Litigation will keep you connected with the cream of the town and open doors for networking and business opportunities, as opposed to remotely rendering corporate law services. Rendering corporate services remotely may have scaling up challenges in the long run, but you never know, when you may hit the jackpot in terms of revenue inflows (as is the case with all other businesses). In litigation, scaling up is not a necessity, if you decide to practice a niche area or do limited matters as you grow older. This is the biggest difference between corporate and litigation practice. In corporate, you need to keep growing in terms of size and revenue.
6. If you wish to rely upon local clientele - people in small cities, including those having businesses don't need a full time corporate lawyer, but need an astute litigator, who understands how basic criminal law, partnership, labour law, contract and succession law works. Paying special attention to local land and revenue law helps. Your knowledge of corporate law helps in visualizing their business arrangements.
7. Drop your inhibitions with litigation (of not having practiced before) and Hindi documentation. It can be easily overcome and it will start coming to you naturally after a few months.
8. Even in small towns, good lawyers make a decent amount of money. Don't compare their average monthly income (from legal practice :-)) with that of a law firm AP salary, because, they live in their own house, large part of their fees is in cash and because you forgot to discount the actual bonus pay out in a law firm. Cost of living between the two cities may be factored in as well.
9. A lawyer whether in a small city or a metro and irrespective of the practice area would remain occupied throughout the day, as there is sufficient work for every one market. If you are sincere, work will keep coming in. The number of cases filed by an average lawyer and the best in town are almost similar, but the difference between the two is their client and fees paid by the client for the same work.
10. Law firm teaches you to be organised, professional, diligent and service oriented. Problem with small town is, big shots don't give audience (not returning phone calls is a common problem) and are stuck with feudal era idea of a client-attorney relationship - don't give too much information, but keep assuring success. This is the pain point you need to address - remain available for the client, meet the deadlines and be a man/ woman of impeccable integrity.
11. You will not get interim relief in 8 out of 10 case in your first year, but the graph gets better with time, after judge starts seeing you regularly appear in his/ her court and sees you as a diligent hard working lawyer. Don't loose patience and don't antagonize the judge or his staff. Litigators don't shout and dramatize - they are precise and persuasive.
12. Remain humble and stop gossiping. Client will come to you for your legal knowledge, but will stick with you, even if you don't get orders all the time, if he sees you to as a humble and honest professional.
13. Chase money, but don't say no to work even if you get paid mere filing expenses. More work means more appearance, More appearances mean better face value in court.
14. Build a team, so that you can expand your practice areas, deliver on time and take on more work. Having a team of your own would also help you confine yourself to stay and final argument matters and you can focus on managing office and client relationships.
15. If you have more than 3 years of work experience, don't join a senior's chamber, else you will get branded as a junior and will find it difficult to charge fees. Taking on their drafting work is fine. Once you get a brief, argue it yourself, unless you are in a tribunal or HC and the client has instructed you to brief a senior. People in small town judge you for engaging an arguing counsel. Network with senior lawyers and request them to send the work outside their practice area your way. Ask your law firm friends to refer you local matters.
16. All districts have consumer and labour courts. Ask corporates to engage you as their counsel.
17. Avoid political affiliation or activism, atleast till you make it big. Representing a political party or activist as a professional is perfectly acceptable.
18. Don't say no to corporate work, unless time management becomes as issue. Please refer to point 14 above.

As it turns out, I wrote more than just my experience, but my earnest piece of advice too :-).

Dear 4.1,

You’re clearly doing PR for NLS here while acting like you’re from JGLS. Your sympathy towards NLS, “ has the best faculty in India along with NLSIU post-Sudhir” and making bizarre claims with no or negligible insider info from JGLS clearly indicates which university from.

Can NLU students please stop acting like Jindal Students on LI? And can other NLU students start using their brain and notice that this guy is clearly trying to push his university forward? Stop fighting for fuck’s sake.

The kid in the OP has clearly done his due diligence and has made a decision. He doesn’t need advice from anonymous strangers who don’t want him to go to JGLS. Even if he decides to not go to JGLS, he wouldn’t want the basis of the same to be some comments from backbenchers who think measuring dicks in LI comment thread will take their university up in the rankings.

Please stick to his question.

Because you cannot file original writs that will go straight to the division bench hearing WA-123.

The 4th and 5th persons' petition will always be placed before the single judge hearing original matters. This single judge may then refer the petitions to DB for the sake of proprietary and convience.

The single judge could've also heard the matter and decide on merits herself if she thought WP4 and WP5 were not similar enough to the appeals pending before DB.

Read your HC's Rules, they will all say something similar in legalese.

Most of the comments above are either factually incorrect or trollish. The OP clearly said they don’t want any comparisons, stop giving unsolicited advice.

Okay, so, to answer the OP scholarship depends on a lot of factor- 1) Are you a female student? 2) Are you a Haryana domicile? 3) Severe Circumstances like death of a parent or belonging to a BPL family. In all these cases you can get a 100% scholarship. If it’s the 3rd case for you, I suggest you approach and involve IDIA for a smoother process for you.

If it’s not any of the aforementioned cases in your case, the highest scholarship you can get is 75% but my best guess at your percentile would be a 50% scholarship. From what i know scholarship standards have increased lately. Back in 2017, you would’ve got a 50% scholarship at anything above 93-94 but now with LSAT becoming more competitive lately, getting scholarships has become extremely tough. You need have a really high percentile to get a scholarship. Which is why in my opinion, you won’t get a 75% scholarship but 50% seems like a probability.

But on a different note, just so you don’t get discouraged, there are multiple opportunities for getting scholarships on campus. You’ll find a lot of students who are on 2-3 different scholarships. You can refer to this post by the JGU page about this student who is on 3 different scholarships (https://www.instagram.com/p/CNH194Vg-at/?utm_medium=copy_link)

Best of luck

SC proceedings were never easily accessible to the public. To enter, you needed a pass signed by an AOR and you were technically only allowed into the court that had your matter. And no interns on miscellaneous days (Mondays and Fridays). In the virtual hearings also, there is a restriction on the number of people who are allowed, so basically you need someone willing to bend the rule for you.

Former Vice-Chancellor of National Law University, Odisha and Registrar of National Law School of India University, Bangalore Prof V Nagaraj has been appointed as the Vice-Chancellor of Dharmashastra National Law University (DNLU), Jabalpur.
He replaces founding Vice-Chancellor of the University, Prof Balraj Chouhan at the helm.

Prof Nagraj began his career as a Lecturer at Havanur College of Law, Bangalore in 1989. Three years later, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Law at NLSIU, and became Associate Professor of Law in 1997. He became Additional Professor of Law in 2000 and Professor of Law in 2006.

He was a Research Scholar at Vanderbilt Law School, USA in 1994 and at Warwick University, UK in 1997.

He served as Registrar at NLSIU from 2008 to 2013 and was later appointed as Vice-Chancellor of NLU Odisha, where he worked for one year before moving back to teach at NLSIU.[img]https://images.app.goo.gl/MU4WPk4GGQ3iNyRr8[/img]

I asked myself and others the same question two years ago. Cleared CFA L1 easily, and am currently preparing for CFA L2 which got delayed due to the second wave. Was scheduled to take the test a month ago.

The reasoning behind my decision to pursue the Charter was three-fold.

1. There is an abundance of corp lawyers in the market at present.The amount of naive freshers I see applying to
my Tier 1 firm that dream of breaking into Big Law is increasing YoY at a staggering rate. The easiest path that I
saw for myself to maintain relevancy and remain afloat in this sea of legal talent, is to nurture a deep
understanding of Industry functions.

2. I work in a practice area closely associated with core corp finance. After listening to your legal jargon, when the
reps of clients are discussing the industry risks faced, and implied opportunities available for the business side of
things, being able to offer a cogent observation carries one far in the eyes of the client.Clients trust me far more today, and my relationships are deeper with them due to them trusting my financial acumen and not just my
legal experience.

3. The last reason is quite simple. OPTIONALITY.
Corp Laywers miss the big picture to focus on the minute details. That's our job after all.
But, if you go down the CFA Path, you will encounter the mental model of optionality used by Financial Analysts
in multiple subjects and chapters.
What we forget in this race is that the world is bigger, far more interesting, far more creative, and far more
lucrative than the embarrassingly small world of a tiny number of respectable law firms in our fledgling country.
Ask yourself, if you were not an individual and rather were a business entity, would it be wise for the biz to
depend entirely on one potential source of revenue?
Market conditions will change, maybe AI replaces us, maybe not (most probably not). Maybe you hate the firm
life down the road. Maybe you want to make decisions and not do the paperwork for the decisions.

What then? No options left but to continue due to sunk cost in your career and no other marketable skills.

CFA will be an extremely arduous undertaking if you wish to study while working at a Tier - 1 like me. My dreams keep me awake - Build some capital here. Finish L3 by then. Get the Charter. Write the GMAT/GRE to get that MBA. Use my diverse experience to build my own niche and offer more to the industry than my peers. There is no question that this will be rewarded for there aren't many that can offer the same.

Hope this perspective helps you.

Entirely agree with this comment but just be careful when implementing this suggestion:

“Accompany him to meet clients and other advocates during the entire 5 years. Travel with him. Meet them, make friends and give an impression that you are competent as your father. Like, take the active role. Don't be just his 'Junior'.”

Do this carefully without treading on the toes of either other juniors in the office or on the toes of other advocates who may come to your father for any work. Fine line to be drawn, but it helps. It is one thing to be a little overconfident with some clients (I say overconfident because no matter how competent, you do not have your fathers experience yet, so there will always be something for your to learn and develop more): but other advocates, as well as “serial” seasoned clients, especially those who have worked with your father for several years, will spot the overconfidence especially if it is not backed by substance. You want to give them the impression at the beginning at least that you are learning and soaking in as much as you can, as well, and gradually come into your own over time.

Think of the 3 - 5 year period not as simply a waiting period: but you also want to learn and develop relationships and show, after 5 years, that you do deserve to inherit the practice too. Maintain good relationships and do not be brash with them. Do not boast about your father’s successes and practice as if it is already your own.

In other words: be as confident as possible - no doubt - but also keep backing that confidence up with substance. If you are caught out as being based only on bluster and air, it will be all the more difficult to get back on track.

It will take 5 years minimum.

It depends on what kind of a practice your father has. Was he making good money etc. Also on your situation - are you already having a good job.

Think whether is it worth to leave your present situation (whatever it is) to join your father practice. Only if you feel it's totally worth, leave. Otherwise your father would be able to give the practice and legacy to his other juniors-and make some money for his retirement through that way.

If you want to inherit his practice keep a few things in mind.

Accompany him to meet clients and other advocates during the entire 5 years. Travel with him. Meet them, make friends and give an impression that you are competent as your father. Like, take the active role. Don't be just his 'Junior'.

Otherwise yours fathers clients will no longer give work to you. Also over the time you must have a control over his practice.

If you want to really benefit from your father's practice. It will take 3 to 5 years.

Ok, so here's why Indian law firms need to have done more and should have been more thankful and appreciative of the lawyers during WFH (and as somebody pointed out in another thread, should have given extra money to lawyers):
1. This is the most important reason in the list - Homes were out safe places. Our homes were places where we could return to every day after the drudgery of a working day to relax and spend time with family, friends and other loved ones. That's gone thanks to WFH. WFH also means that you are encroaching on your family members space where they could do as they pleased at THEIR homes. Every time you have to take a conference call now, the whole family has to make sure that there are no loud noises, people can't talk normally within their own houses. Law firms please recognise you have 'encroached' people's houses so that your business can continue.
2. There was an implied agreement when we signed our retainer agreements. That the Firm would provide a safe working environment and a functional office with necessary infrastructure, which you could utilize to optimize our work. WFH turned that around. Now we are forced to work from home, with limited resources and are expected to have the same level (if not more) of output/ quality.
3. None of the law firms declared as to how long would WFH would continue. It was just indefinite and one could be called back any time. Unlike some big tech companies such as Google, etc. which up front declared that WFH would be effective till June, 2021, etc. The end result is that lawyers are still paying rent for rented accommodation in their city of work while they are actually not staying in such rented accommodation and are working from their home town. Lawyers could have saved lakhs of money!
4. No relaxation of targets, while bonuses and increments were either suspended, delayed or entirely denied. Is that fair?
5. No policy to govern WFH peculiarities. The partner and other seniors feel free to call at odd hours to give more and more work. Is that not harassment?
6. Expenses related to WFH (this is to some degree connected to 2 above). WFH from meant extra expenses for lawyers. Hi speed WiFi at home (because those dongles provided by firms are shit), furniture, laptop stands, accessories, second screens, etc etc. All of these add up to extra costs. Has any law firm offered any allowance/ reimbursement for these expenses?
7. WE ARE LIVING THROUGH A PANDEMIC. It's in caps for all those people who tend to forget. Mental health has been affected drastically. People have lost loved ones and are suffering from grief. Medical expenses have gone up. There's uncertainty about the future. People are afraid of who else might get infected and who they may lose. There are not enough vaccines out there. The state absolved itself of all responsibility during the second wave. And yet lawyers are supposed to work through all this and act like every thing is normal.

Note : Before any smart aleck responds by saying "what's stopping you from coming back to office", I'd like to say this. I should not be made to compromise my safety for livelihood. I should not have to make a choice between being at danger of contracting a deadly virus by coming to work daily and letting my work from home affect my mental health and slowly kill me. That's a choice between a risk of dying and killing yourself slowly. That's not realy a choice.

And to anybody who is thinking "then don't work in a law firm na" - yes I could stop working in a law firm and the law firm could easily find a replacement for me. No, I don't want to leave a law firm. I don't want to be unemployed in a pandemic. All I want is for law firms to recognise the hardships we are all going through and maybe appreciate that we've gone beyond the norm to work for them to ensure THEIR profits and normal operations. Without us, they would not have made the money they did. Know this, while lawyers would be able to somehow manage without law firms, law firms can never manage without lawyers. The lawyers enabled WFH, not firms, while making so many sacrifices with no extra motivation. Gratitude from the law firms would not be misplaced.

I really hope law firms' management reads this honestly and not pass this off as another rant on Legally India. Stay safe and healthy y'all.

Considering many, if not most, Indian Law Schools offer electives, it might be a good idea to compile a list of the most unique, innovative and creative elective courses offered across Law schools in India. Comment with such elective/s either taken by you (with feedback) or that you credibly know of to have been offered.

Tuition: 3,61,500.
Source: https://www.symlaw.ac.in/admission-process

The costs given below are approximate. YMMV.

Accomodation:
There are no hostels at SLS Pune.
You'll be living in Viman Nagar which is a pretty upscale area
It will cost you around 5-7k for PG and 12-15k for flats.
Flat costs can be brought down by roommates.

Food:
There are alot of homemade food mess in VN area for 3-4k.

Entertainment:
You'll go to a private school and not have any fun?
Assume 4-5k extra p.m. for entertainment.

15-20k for one month.

360k + 240k = 6 lakh p.a. (again, YMMV)

I don't think (and happy to be corrected) that the SQE diverts in any manner from the existing QLTS process, in so far as it applies to qualified lawyers from other jurisdictions. You have two sets of exams (SQE 1 and 2), which are on the same pattern as the QLTS (MCT and OSCE). There is no training requirement that an Indian lawyer has to go through. Take both sets of exams, clear them and then apply to the SRA for admission as a solicitor.

More information here - overseas qualified lawyers are exempt from the training requirements and only have to pass the exams: https://www.sra.org.uk/solicitors/qualified-lawyers/qualified-lawyers/

@2: Makes no sense - the process has always been harder for overseas lawyers under the QLTS process. Domestic lawyers have to do their LPC and training contract. LPC exams are difficult but not as expansive or stressful as the QLTS. Overseas lawyers have to do the QLTS process (even if they're trainees at a UK firm). The SQE is actually making it harder for domestic UK students, because they now have to go through the same process.

@3: That was the case under the QLTS regime as well. Don't know how that makes it tougher.

@1: This does not impact employability at all. This is just a change in the examination system for qualifying as a solicitor in England and Wales.

Your skill set and its transferability, your academic credentials and Indian work experience will matter. Your interviews will matter. Most importantly, UK firms have major regulatory headaches with respect to hiring candidates from outside the UK, including sponsoring your visa. That is the primary reason for the limited Indian pool at firms there. Only the big US firms and Magic Circle firms are willing to sponsor candidates.

Depends on your year of study. Grades are important throughout law school, but their importance for getting law firm internships decreases as you progress through the years. Initially, grades will almost be the sole criteria for getting internships as you won't have much of anything else on your CV. Later on, you might see people holding poor ranks but with tier 1 law firm internships on their CV being preferred over students with better ranks but less internship experience. At least this has been my experience so far. In my batch, I regularly see students with ranks in the 60s getting shortlisted over students in the top 20 ranks if the former have better internships on their CV.

Since June is Pride month, we are trying to compile and feature some of the initiatives being undertaken by firms regarding the same:

1. CAM - LinkedIn page - Pride coloured DP; One LinkedIn post with quote- “We stand with pride”
Celebrating 3 core principles- inclusivity, diversity and equal rights.

2. SAM - LinkedIn page- Pride coloured DP with caption in DP “celebrating pride in diversity”
Instagram - Dedicated page on celebrating Diversity(seems they will have more upcoming posts)
Shared a Spotify #pride playlist on Instagram
LinkedIn & Insta - video compilation of messages from employees showing solidarity

3. Khaitan & Co. - LinkedIn Dp with a caption- #MatterOfPride

4. Luthra & Luthra - Nothing available publicly on LinkedIn

5. Trilegal - Coloured line in LinkedIn DP

6. JSA - Nothing available publicly on LinkedIn

7. AZB - Nothing available publicly on LinkedIn

8. Indus - LinkedIn DP change with colour pride background
Video of a partner discussing Diversity as part of WILDialogs (seems to be diversity initiative of Indus) but on a different LinkedIn page

Till now, SAM seems to have been the most vocal about Pride month. If we have missed out any other firms’ initiatives regarding Pride month which you believe needs to be highlighted, please let know in the comments.

If you are aiming for a tier-1 MBA in India or outside, then the obvious high paying career options are in finance and consulting. As pointed out in other comments, these roles offer similar work environment, but higher pay, and a lot of travel. However, MBA can open up other opportunities too, but these will likely require letting go of your law background. I have listed some options below, but difficult to comment what would be a better fit as you haven't mentioned your current practice area and if you're willing to move away from it.

(i) Roles in marketing or product management are other post-MBA top picks (assuming you have an interest + are able to gain relevant experience during MBA through internships and projects).

(ii) Apart from MBA, consider experimenting with in-house work. Growth stage companies in new age sectors are exciting for lawyers as they operate in regulatory grey areas. They are also willing to pay tier-1 firm level (or more) salaries to the right talent, and have proactive involvement of legal teams in day-to-day operations. Write compelling cold emails to the founders/ legal heads, and chances of getting a response are higher than (iii) below.

(iii) Going in-house with companies in traditional markets (such as real estate, banking, heavy industries) is another option, but the pay will be lesser compared to (ii), and the work is likely to be laidback.

(iv) Pursuing a career in policy. If you work in regulatory/ litigation practice then can move in-house in policy teams (especially with companies in (ii)), or work with think tanks.

If you are looking at MBA only as a move away from law, i'd suggest you think through the long-term goal before diving into the degree. Be very sure of what you want out of the MBA so that you opt for the right electives, clubs, internships, exchange, and alumni networks. Going blind into the course will disable you from getting most out of it, and will pretty much leave you exactly where you started (except with a piece of paper as a degree).

As Kian pointed out, this is a trollish post not meriting a response. But in case one wishes to engage, do consider the following points:

1. Everything should be merit based is a fallacious capitalist concept from the 18th century. Why? Cause not everyone is born equal. You're no better than the child of your maid. it's just that you were born with socio economic privileges that she wasn't, and this inequality will only gradually increase, putting you at a chronic advantage over her- read about the principle of Cumulative Advantage by Robert Merton to understand this better. Therefore to measure her against the same yardsticks as you would be a social, economic and mathematical anomaly and grossly unfair on her, since you had access to socio economic resources/ privileges that she simply didn't.

2. Non-reservation hence is the ultimate destination, since a society where reservation isn't needed, is also one where everyone is born with the same socio economic resources. Hence to do away with reservation, we need to eliminate the necessity for reservation (i.e. socio economic differenes). The fact that privileged kids (the author, in context of the socio economic realities in India) lack the clarity and empathy to realize this, and quite happy to enjoy his own privileges at the cost of others, show that we're far from there.

The whataboutry in the comments section is astonishing.

Not a JGLS student. Not a NLU student either. But I’ve followed this entire fiasco. This was really not needed.

It started with tweets from primarily two people I have the screenshots but I don’t i think I should mention the usernames for privacy. One of those two people was a 14 year old anti caste activist who tweeted, “ Never understood how kids from Ashoka and Jindal mention their colleges with so much pride. Like please keep that shit to yourself it's embarrassing” which was out of nowhere. Then came another tweet or comment from a law student on jindal kid’s og tweet which was related to the ongoing cancellation of exams, which went like “they really do argue about the lack of merit while sitting in Jindal. If u are in a private university, work with the assumption that u have no merit”.

This was replied by Jindal kid and her tweets triggered a huge uproar. Two of her tweets went like this, “Sorry I was born to two people who could afford decent education for their child and didn’t want me to spend my 20s from the ragging and harassment going on in govt colleges” and then “My LSAT score was 98.9 and I came in the top 500 rank of AILET. I’ve been a straight A student and topper all my life, with a CV that doesn’t have the word “participation” in it. I cleared 30 great college entrances across the country and Jindal gave me a free ride. But pls go on.”

The tweets jindal students went viral and she started beefing with 3-4 NLU kids who replied to the comment. She further posted her AILET and CLAT results to prove her point and merit. And this attempt of her trying to prove her ranks was trolled heavily. This trolling soon turned into bullying when some kids made sexual slurs amongst other kind of objectionable comments against her. When this started some jgls kids came to her defence and this incited more NLU students to join forces. Subsequently Jindal and its students were targeted.

My opinion hereon:-

JGLS student’s tweet might be problematic but what’s more problematic is the tweet that she replied to. “they really do argue about the lack of merit while sitting in Jindal. If u are in a private university, work with the assumption that u have no merit”— this is the real problem. This kind of ideology and superiority complex is extremely problematic. Students from private colleges are beating government colleges in jobs that are acquired through merit, moots, debates and what not. As pointed out by OP getting into an NLU is a cakewalk thanks to NRI reservations. Universities like Symbiosis, Nirma and NMIMS are consistently ranked above most of your government NLUs and are performing everywhere.

Replies:
1. Moral policing, definitely. In a system where your elevation is an entirely opaque process driven by opinions held by 60-65 year old men, you will have to inevitably comply with their norms and morals if you want to be in their good books. It may matter a little less if you are okay with retiring as an Addl. District Judge or District Judge. Those promotions are more time-based.
2. How many years of such scrutiny? Your entire career. And the scrutiny does not just come from your seniors, but also your colleagues and lawyers. You post too many #TravelLust photos and the next thing you know someone will move corruption allegations against you. It will take you at least 5 years to prove yourself innocent if departmental proceedings are moved against you.
3. IB Check: For our previous generation, who are currently getting elevated, they did not have a digital life except for the past 10-12 years with the advent of smartphones. Your parents may have done a lot of compromising things in their teenage/younger life which you will never know about because there no proof. For our generation, whose entire life has been digital since childhood, it will get tricky. For god's sake, your every move right from your browsing history to porn searches to every message you've ever written to anyone on Facebook - the digital footprint of that exists. You can try deleting (I have) but it's nearly impossible to completely wipe clean your digital footprint. I just hope that by the time our elevations come up, either the "right to be forgotten" has become a thing in India or the society has become so liberal it doesn't care what its judges do in their personal lives.

But yes, overall it is always advisable to start caring about your digital privacy from right on - the earlier, the better. You can check out this channel if you are interested in that: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs6KfncB4OV6Vug4o_bzijg

For better or worse, college is not like an episode of Euphoria. Nobody will go out of their way to force alcohol or drugs on you, and you can be the life of the party without any intoxicants. You can always firmly yet politely decline any substances offered to you. No friendship that hinges on substance abuse is worth it, and relationships that matter will hold steady regardless of your vices.

The code of conduct essentially says a judge, to be effective in his profession, "should conduct himself/herself the same way outside the court as they would in the court". It is based on some vague notion that once you are a judge, you represent law & justice 24x7 and not just during your work hours - because if someone's respect towards you decreases as a person, their respect towards the courts will also decrease.

So while the exact protocols will differ from state to state and even office to office, the broad idea is you have to act like a responsible judge all the time. No fooling around with lawyers in your court, meeting them after work except in an official and transparent setting, or any person/businessman/official which can create a conflict of interest.

Also, "upholding the integrity the court" has also come to mean "abiding by Indian public's moral standards". So, no partying, drinking in public places, moving around in shorts or public display of affection. I know an Addl. District Judge who did not get promoted because he kisses his wife in public.

With respect to social media, there is no absolutely ban (at least in my office and state - West Bengal). But there are too many restrictions which make it not worth it - you can express opinion (includes likes, comments, subscribe) on any public issue or private matter which may come to you for adjudication. Even if one of the parties or lawyer is your Facebook 'friend', the opposing party can move a petition for you to be recused from the case as you have a potential 'conflict'. You can post your own pictures but don't post barebody gym photos, your overweight and unhealthy seniors in the HC and SC may not like it and hence, may not promote you (they won't cite that as the reason, of course but the selection process is too opaque for you to ever figure out why you did not get elevated).

Additionally, if you are being considered for the High Court, there will be IB background checks on you. Your past digital history and activity will be searched. So, anything compromising - including messages on Facebook and Instagram are a strict no no. Your calls and messages are tracked as well. Use Signal or at least WhatsApp for your communication and do not retain chat histories if you type things like "Please get me some maal".

One common workaround that most of us follow for social media is having a pseudonym or a fake profile. Just that may not help with IB checks since it is your device will be tracked.

Communicating my doubts with the team was something I struggled with a lot during my first few months. My workaround for this this has been to clearly check with team members personally if they would be amenable to me texting them my doubts over WhatsApp/ teams message since calling them all the time is quite intimidating for me. If your team members are active texters you can try this out too.

Have heard that there are many restrictions a judge (Lower Judiciary) or even HC/SC have to abide by.

For example, Social Media Restrictions and the rule that they can't talk to the media. And also that they can't go for any public events.

Is true or just hearsay?

Are there any written rules? What are the penalties if a judge doesn't observe any of these?

What are the most common restrictions. Can anyone throw some light over it?

For example, Can a sitting judge have a YouTube channel or Facebook Account?

Why is retirement a milestone in your life? Is it some point at which you will not do any work you have done in the past and focus only on hobbies, charity, etc? The concept of 'retirement' is ingrained in our society as the only other alternative to slaving your life away. It's made to seem like there is only black and white, working in a job/law firm or retirement. Why are we so wedded to these notions, that actually focus attention on how your employer would like you to think of your life - either slaving or doing nothing at all (retirement). They want you to think of your life in this black and white, which then makes it painfully apparent to you how much money you need to pull off retirement, which forces you to work even harder in the hopes of getting there reasonably early, which is all great for the employer because they're only thinking of the multiples they'll make on the amount you need for your retirement objectives. The cycle goes on. Your employer will suck an entire chunk of 10-15 years, the best years of your life, if they you let them dangle that carrot of a retirement in front of you. It's easy to look at higher PQE pay and just console yourself it's just a few years more. Time will slip away from your hands like fine sand in the desert.

I just want to take a moment here to say that all of you who are contemplating how many years to 'complete freedom' and other stuff like that - life isn't black and white. Retirement isn't a promised land where everything in life is rosy and great. In between you have 15-20 years (optimistically) in which a majority of major life milestones will lie - love, death and self-development. You can't reverse what happens in those 15-20 years after you 'retire'. If you consider your life as a WIP project, do you want to write only 1 chapter (work) out of 10?

If you are (a) young, (b) aren't in danger of being out on the streets (c) and think you have marketable skills even if you don't know how yet, spend your available time and energy into figuring things out. Employment is a drug to dull your instincts. It's a bit like Huxley's Brave New World. Identifying the deficiencies of your mental constructs, which are primarily peer-ingrained, is the first step.

If family and home is a priority for you, then both MBA and UPSC may be not the best options. Even if you get your home cadre in UPSC (which is rarer these days), your initial 10 years will be remote district postings and you won't be with your family, assuming you live in a state capital.

In case of an Indian MBA, your investment-return ratio will only work out if you end up working in Tier 1 cities (Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi etc). In case of foreign MBAs, the same will only work out if you work abroad. That said the effort required for CAT and GMAT is comparatively less if you have good analytical skills. People crack it with 3-6 months of prep, while UPSC takes 1-2 years at minimum. Two NUJS grads this year got into Wharton and IIM-Calcutta - you can check out their profiles.

If you rule out MBA and UPSC, then your best options are:

1. Start up: It can be anything you are good at including law. Litigation is not the only alternative to law firms. You can specialize in creating a start-up incubator where you advise people traverse the legalities of starting a company or raising funds. It can an application/software that streamlines some work/processes at law firms (you have worked for 4 years, you know the redundancies). You need not know how to code to make an application. You just need to hire a person for 2-3 months. Something as simple as an app to generate stamp duty matrixes, for example? That will save law firms hours and earn you lakhs.

2. Academia: Get an LLM (you can get one in India unless you have saved a lot of money). Become a part-time faculty at any law college in your city (you don't need NET or PhD to be part time faculty). Will earn you a decent 60k-100k depending on the institution. Enough to sustain your regular expenses and not eat into your savings. You will end up taking 2 hours of classes per day. Assuming preparation time, you will work for 4 hours in a day, 20 hours in a week. Then use your rest of the day and weekends to do something you absolutely love without having to worry about money. Can be starting a nursery and selling plants or theatre or learning to code or building websites or selective litigation (pro-bono human rights lawyering). You can anyone you want to be once you don't have to worry about the money.

You have at least 40-50 years of active life ahead of you. Don't restrict yourself to one single profession, vocation or identity. Earlier generations did that because life expectancy was 40 back then. You could only do one career in life. Now, almost all of us will end up changing careers at least 3-4 times by the end of the century.

If you have some time, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIyjkkUk80w
It's one hour long but it's worth it.

The 25x thumbrule is based on the Trinity Study, which indicated that a portfolio of 50% stocks (the S&P500 index) and 50% bonds would last at least 30 years if the person withdrew 4% of it in year 1 and then each year increased that amount to account for inflation. Do note that this is USA centric and based on an assumed retriement duration of 30 years. We simply dont have enough data to conclusively back test this for Indian investors.

For someone who is retiring early, the retirement duration will be much longer. You have also assumed a real return of 4% (Portfolio return - Inflation). It is commonly known that India underreports inflation data. Even if the numbers were true, specific expense items like education and healthcare typically see a much higher inflation. So a 4% real return may not be very likely.

Secondly, the x in 25x is your annual expenses at the time of retirement. But some exceptions aside, everyone desires relatively higher comfort as they get older. I may be able to backpack and live in hostels at 35, but may not be as enthusiastic about that proposal at 50. I may not have kids today, but will also need to bring them along to said resort in 2035. So we should assume that our annual expenses will also grow - and not just on account of retail inflation but also on account of lifestyle inflation.

Going forward, and assuming one has to pay for kids' education etc, a 25x corpus may not be enough. I am a firm believer in the 40x corpus in cases where you foresee no gainful employment post retirment and plan to live off your investments. That said, to each their own. I am a stranger ranting on an internet forum. This is clearly not financial advice.

Hey

Sorry, no one responded to you on this. I’ve interviewed many people over the years and noticed some trends of how they are conducted both from colleagues at my level and senior, so happy to give my two cents.

- I don’t know how other firms do it but in my firm (tier 1) usually the first round is with Partner(s) and second round with Senior Partner of the team. I guess firms that have HR take care of the second round
- it’s important to focus on the first round, as second round is mostly a formality and BS, both HR/senior Partners interview on soft skills only, and rely completely on initial interview feedback from their team partners/SAs whoever interviewed you
- while one can’t predict, but if someone is professional, they will ask you questions on your CV as technically that’s what you’re supposed to know, so be sure you know that and don’t try to inflate your experience. One usually gets caught on this, and it’s a hole difficult to drag yourself out from if the interviewer gets stuck on a point. In my view, it looks bad if someone doesn’t know their CV, or if you’re a fresher, you can’t talk about what all the million articles you’ve listed on your CV were about. So brush up on that
- if above happens to you - endless black hole that is, don’t worry, it’s important to just keep calm under pressure. I’ve noticed most people get so nervous knowing that they are going in the wrong direction and frankly interviewers sometimes are rude / love to ask questions they themselves don’t know answers to (topic for another day) which adds to the pressure, they they kind of collapse and the interview is ruined from there. This happened to me many years back when I was interviewing and I’m killing it now, so don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s better to answer what you know, try to develop your train of thought that while I haven’t dealt with those aspects, if you’d like I can walk you through how I’d approach it .. etc etc. if you don’t know something at all, just say you don’t know
- it’s always cool to know what’s latest in your practice area / if you’re a fresher updates in respect of the topics you dealt with while interning / stuff you wrote. People like it and you can just drop it off in the end to close your point
- A common mistake is people naming clients, details of transactions, people don’t like that as it shows immaturity especially if you’re interviewing for a senior position. Use pseudonyms or say I can talk about details that are publicly available if it was a deal, and what my role was etc
- if someone is constantly asking questions outside your CV, you can’t do much, politely say it’s not part of my experience so far, try to answer what you can. You shouldn’t want to work with an idiot like that anyway
- don’t bitch about your previous firm / boss. Honestly you need to know, all Indian law firms are cliques. They love to hear bad things about other firms, but they also know they do that same shit themselves, so they’d imagine you doing the same with them and negate you as not being a ‘team player’ or similar nonsense. Political views, etc best avoided. I don’t want to get into a debate of whether this is right or not, it’s just the truth of how to game this system. Don’t expect nuance and understanding etc.
- So first round likely to be quite technical, second one will be whatever goes
- if work life balance is important to you, by all means ask those questions to be more aware about the team, and I assure you if you ask too many questions in that area, you’re unlikely to get a call back. No one works in Indian law firms to have a balanced life

Best of luck!

-

The Panel Discussion will be streamed live at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTPPL4hJw5sCXI6RsIUzGkA.

All the interested participants can join the same & critically engage in a civilised manner. NUJS has explicitly said it to be a legal discussion and not political.

For example: arguing against reservation immediately brands you a casteist. Arguing the merits (lack thereof) of third-wave feminism brands you a sexist/misogynist, arguing in favour of reduction of tax rates, lesser regulation brands you as insensitive/capitalist pig etc who hates the poor and needs to check their privilege, regardless of the fact that said person is from a lower middle class family in the first place and is perhaps not speaking such things from a selfish perspective, arguing against the mainstream view of transgender identities will brand you transphobic, anything said against Islam brands you a bigot/Muslim hater.

Of course blanket illogical/irrational beliefs should not be given the highest platform. But if someone uses logic and rationality to argue the abovesaid points they shouldn't be cancelled. There is an unnecessary amount of "gotcha" everytime something that doesn't conform to the left-liberal viewpoint is said. It is unfortunate that those who wield the most social capital are rigidly left-liberal and then do ALL THEY CAN to exclude such view points because they are "problematic" etc etc.

I think what Kian meant was modify their privacy policy by not tracking IP addresses. If Legally India starts releasing people's identities, their business will shut down in a month.

That said, this conversation has hardly anything to do with the identity of any person. I'm sure associates in most teams, in most firms are facing these issues. An honest conversation with the partner isn't really the solution. Even partners are merely PAs to the Managing Partner. This has to be a wider conversation on law firm culture. Panel discussions among MPs, @Kian?

My first rant on LI. (Discussion on money 🤑🤑)

I have been working for 10 years in tier one firms and I have only 30L in savings. Not proud of where I spent it all. In a way, don't regret it either. 20s was when I could have had most fun with money, and I did. I have zero debt though- no housing loan, no car loan. Even now, I am not inclined to save because I don't have an end goal. There are months I still live paycheck to paycheck (cos that 30l is not exactly liquid).

I know that as a professional, I can quit the law firm life anytime and still earn a living. May be my standard of living will drop. That's fine; I had hit that rock bottom in law school anyway, with zero pocket money to spend on discretionary stuff.

If ever I get rich, I will probably give it all away in any case. Right now I'm spending it all away, which has also the same effect, in a manner of speaking.

Savings is overrated. Live the life you want, without hurting anyone. Obviously, I'm going to look stupid in my 60s, when everyone else happily retires and I will still be struggling to make my ends meet.

'Leftists' you find in elite law institutions are 'left liberals'. In other words, they are merely left of centre.

'Communists' you refer to are 'far left' defined by a single party left system. Only thing beyond them on this spectrum, is 'revolutionary left' and/or 'militant left' (think Naxals). Again, with the latter you would do well keep in mind the adage - one man's militant is another's....

Finally, a lot of the right is also scattered across the spectrum. There is the 'economic right' (think Adam Smith), or the 'religious right' (think VHP). Then, there has always been an amalgam of this which comes in as the 'nationalistic right' - gathers support by aligning money and fervour (generally against any one 'other').

Incidentally, both the 'nationalistic right' and 'single party left' ate similar - centralising, ham-fisted, rhetorical.

Therefore, people like me (left of centre waala left liberal crowd) are against both - China ka communism, and Hitler ka fascism. I do not want either. However, I am willing to live with my law firm friend's ka 'economic right' while arguing for a better deal for those less fortunate than us. Humein Adani, Ambani, Jindal ki oxygen se issue nahin hai, but unki monopolising tendencies se hai which stand on crony capitalism.

Left right bahut deep hai. Yeh aapko Arnab nahin samjha payega, aur na main. Aap apna chilaana jaari rahein.

People don’t understand that conservatism is extremely broad. I am economically conservative and all these people purporting to be left also become economically conservative as soon as they get a tier 1 job and if they don’t manage to secure one, they become marxists.

Moreover it is not an objective three front choice but an entire spectrum to choose from. Socially, I am a liberal leaning towards right. And I have shifted towards right from left when I realise how left contradicts free speech itself. People need to know that two contradicting ideologies are extremely essential for a society. As per John Rawls’ harm theory, free speech must be curbed only when it incurs direct (or maybe indirect too) harm to an individual. But let people speak? The thing is that when you say institutions must not have any rw society, you are polarising views towards a single ideology. When a single ideology, be it left or right, exists in any closed space, we have witnessed what happens in regards to Hitler, lenin and stalin. Contradicting ideology, no matter how harsh it is, must exist in order to create a balance. If an institution is full of left wingers and the authority becomes autocratic, who is gonna criticise it? Criticism brings about changes.

Fair, while it is hard to be conservative in some colleges, its not like you are being punished by your peers. As long as you don't say something outrageous (like Modi is good for Muslims), people will be on normal terms with you. Sure, being part of the 'woke' club might earn you brownie points in some institutions, but as long as you are nice, kind, etc.... people won't cancel you or anything.

Plus if you are really sure about where you stand politically, don't let a bunch of college kids ruin your commitment to your ideals.

I'm an Associate with one of the tier-1s. Here are some tips:

1. Don't hesitate to ask around for work. Check LinkedIn to see who works in what practice area and shoot them an email requesting for work. Compared to working from office, this may offer you more flexibility in choosing what work to do. If an associate doesn't have work to delegate, they may refer a colleague.

2. Ask for feedback. I'm always happy to get on a call with an intern or email them with feedback if I have the time. Some associates may not want to, but there's no harm in asking.

3. Speak to HR. You can always call up HR and tell them you do not have any work assigned to you at the moment. Depending on the firm, HR may proactively find you some work to do.

4. Speak to a partner. This one's a bit tricky, because no partner wants to be flooded by intern emails. However, if you've been working steadily on a few matters, or have past experience in the firm, or you're two vodkas down and feeling very brave, emailing a partner clearly (yet briefly) stating your work preferences and offering assistance may just work. Worst case scenario you get a very angry phone call, but that's going to be every day working as an associate, so may as well prepare for it :)

Mr nobody! The panel is diverse in nature. Mr Shivam Shankar Singh was associated with BJP IT Cell & worked as its data analyst. Yashwant Sinha was a Minister in BJP Led govt of Atal Bihari Vajpayee & was associated with the party for more than 25 years. His son is still BJP MP. And more importantly, it is not a political event. It's a legal event for deliberation & discussion. Manish Tewari is not coming as Congress leader, he's coming as an advocate & former I&B minister. Thakurta is an author & academician. Sinha is from Fact-checking website which is in news & will also be cross-questioned.

Depends, on what you want in life.

If you are thinking about Money, Luxury Offices & Cars , then judicial services is not something which you will like. You will get 80K month + Facilities as a fresher. Over the years it can increase to Rs. 150K - 250K per month. Secure life, Assured Salaries & Stress Free Job.

Being from Top 5 NLU's doesn't always mean you can do the T1/2 Law Firm work-taking the responsibility and work pressure and of course long working hours. Judicial Services is good if you want a stress free (it's almost the opposite of a career in a law firm/ even an in house counsel) , guaranteed income till 60's.

You can retire as a Principle District Judge or as a High Court Judge (chances are less) max.

Your peers at law firms start as freshers with almost the same salary. But the difference is, thier salary will/may multiply 10 to 20 times over the course of a few years. Even you Litigating Friends (from Top 5 NLU's) may make upto a crore more than you, while appearing in the same court room where you are preciding.

There are Judge's who sit till night, hear a lot of cases. But it's your option. If you want to sit from 10 to 5, it's upto you. As long as you don't do any - totally illegal stuff chances of you getting suspended/dismissed from judicial services is zero.
Want to take a day off, or less cases per day. No questions asked. Do the same in a law firm, and you will be on the street.

In a Law Firm, you will be having sophisticated work/clients and super smart competitive colleagues with Foreign LLM's. In a Trial Court you are going to work with common people (from every walks of life) Your colleagues will almost never be from a Top 5 NLU. Also, You can't use your stylish Law School English in a Trial Court. You will have to learn the local language- to read and write.

Also there is no common judicial services in India. The working conditions also varies from state to state-everything. Even salary can vary from state to state (from 50K to 100K as a fresher)

So far, Delhi is the most lucrative lower judicial services, even attempted by Top NLU folks.

I can speak for Allahabad High Court (NOT the Lucknow Bench).

A senior designation doesn't impact so much, the lawyers are generally also earning around the same figure otherwise. The figure can vary - I know seniors who charge 1L appearance/case (depending on affordability of litigant and kind of matter) and the highest I've heard someone charge is roundabout 3.5L appearance/case (the senior-most designated senior).

Since NOIDA falls under Alld HC's jurisdiction, it is the main money pot for civil-commercial lawyers. Most real estate cases come from there. Apart from that I think it is mostly service matters that are done frequently. There's also an NCLT Bench here, so companies either engage arguing counsel from Delhi who fly in, or well-known names from Allahabad - designated seniors get an opportunity to print here as well.

Criminal lawyers of course make potloads with the right clients. Allahabad is the seat to a lot of political movement, parties are always trying to one up each other through filing cases against each other - leads to a lot of criminal law work, esp bail and 482 apps.

Until recently, Anticipatory Bail did not apply to UP, so the workaround to that was a 482 application. However, now anticipatory bail is available, and that work has gone to the Trial Courts, away from the HC.

Distances are negligible, quality of life is peaceful, so the money in relative terms is much more than the money in Tier 1 cities. A meal for two at the most expensive restaurant won't exceed 2k (on the higher side). Property costs are a bit on the higher side relatively, but much lower than Delhi Bombay.

To get hired at the fresher level at NDA, you need to intern with them twice.

Make a good impression during your first internship and ask the team if they liked your work, how you can improve etc during the entire time you are there.

During your last week, be upfront about it and don't beat around the bush and ask your chances of getting recruited and if they liked your work. If they give you a positive response, intern with them one more time to get a PPO.
Even if you are not exceptional your chances of getting recruited are higher if you have a frank conversation about job opportunities at the firm than you being exceptional and sitting passively hoping folks at the firm to notice your work and then offer you a position.

NDA is very selective when it comes to internships. Given that they don't have an policy of hiring from campus, internships are the only way to get hired (barring a few exceptions here and there).

You get interviewed basis the interest areas and get an internship with the same team with a leader level person allotted to you as your mentor. Your mentor will be your go-to person for everything right from work, expectations, processes, callbacks, review etc.

Perform well and then get recommended by your mentor and other persons with whom you have worked with for another stint. Getting a callback is really difficult. NDA hardly takes more than 20 interns for all offices in a particular month. In a calendar year, you will only see handful of them getting a second internship (top 15% percentile is what the hiring policy mentions).

Once you get the second internship which is generally with the same team, chances are decent that you are being considered for recruitment given that the team sizes are very small (usually 7-10) so everyone knows who is working on what matters.

Perform well without being complacent and subject to the requirements of the team, you will be recommended for an interview. Well, there are three rounds of interviews before you finally get an offer letter. Expect the interviews to be very conceptual and technical.

I have known Vijay for 25 years now. His room was right next to mine and as a college senior, he was one of the rare few who didn't treat juniors any differently. We were all equal, and he would regularly come in to give us help on stuff we were grappling with - I remember him explaining the Wagon Mound cases in my first month, and it was fascinating.
The character of the man has always been of regard, consideration and kindness. For those who are critical of this initiative, rest assured that Vijay is not one to do this for publicity - he has had ample opportunity to advertise his manifold accomplishments over the years, but he has not.
I wonder why unkindness is so rampant on these message boards, especially when decent people take decent steps to help others.

Again, missing the wood for the trees:

On 1 and 2: Surely we are not the only profession that is a victim of India's piss poor education system? How have the others solved for this?

On 3: Yes, hence the 15 - 20% buffer and if you notice all my calculations are on the lower end. As an aside, there are also practices that work mostly on hourly mandates, why are their associates working 72 hours. Yes, practices subsidise each other, but that's equally a problem with the law firm model. For instance, a corporate partner who finds it within their realm of expertise to advise on tax or intellectual property with no prior experience makes his associates put in the work to figure that out and spend 15 hours extra, completely unaccounted for, with no repayment.

On 4: Even if they pad their time sheets, my calculation only accounts for time billed to the client. Not entered into your timesheet. Surely you don't meant to suggest that A0s are spending a whole bunch of time that they don't at all enter into their timesheets.

On 5: Lol, wasn't litigation complaining about the exact same thing? Which is true? Also, and if it is true, isn't that precisely the problem we're trying to solve for - shitty work life tradeoffs, inflated hours, and poor growth prospects push them away. Please also see 1 on this.

On 6: You're right not every A0 works 72 hours. Back when I was an A0 there have been months when I've worked 110 hour weeks. Work is cyclical sure, but it averages it self out to that hour figure over time.

Instead of resorting to the "oh these poo poo millennials are ruining my ability to exploit them like I was exploited" can we at least introspect on what we can do to make everyone's life better? Not a single T1 law firm has even attempted to solve this problem. There's a deep cultural rot in this system, and we can't look the other way. Obviously if you have people working these kinds of hours with a poor return on their life or a poor work life tradeoff you're going to have temper issues and toxic workplaces. Addressing that helps everyone. I'm fairly senior in the system myself and I understand the need to protect our revenues, but surely we can at least attempt to increase the efficiencies? Even a 20% reduction in the total number of hours spent means the poor A0 can at least work out, or spend time with a loved one, or develop an actual hobby. But oh no, we don't do that here.

Then there's the argument of oh even foreign law firms and investment banks etc are like this. Which was what was Ganit's original point, in those other places what makes it somewhat worth it is how much of that trickles down.

These numbers are actually quite telling if we only but slightly reframe the question - what is the productivity of your average A0? Let us for the sake of argument assume that an A0 has to bill their client 5x of their annual retainer in order for the partner to be make a decent return on this A0, i.e. they need to bill 80L.

Assuming a fairly average practice I'm going to apportion that about 20% of this revenue comes from foreign clients (paying the most conservatively low rate of USD 180 per hour) and the remaining 80% of this coming from Indian clients (paying again, the most conservatively low rate of USD 6500 per hour). Use these figures to calculate how many hours a week said A0 needs to work in order to recover this, with the assumption that this A0's team is generous and allows them to take two weeks in the year off (i.e. they put in productive hours for 11.5 months a year).

INR ((16,00,000/(180x72))/11.5)/4 = 2.7 hours a week
INR ((64,00,000/(6500))/11.5)/4 = 21.4 hours a week

This means that the average A0 needs to bill only about 24 hours a week in order for them to recover enough money to be profitable to the firm. Yet most A0s spend a multiple of at least 3x of that time in a week.

The question we really need to be asking ourselves is how do we solve for this time sink of about 45 hours a week when this time is apparently just going nowhere. The unit cost to produce one hour of A0 work is too damn high. And this figure is with some super generous assumptions. The likely required weekly billing is probably lower than that by 15-20%.

Ganit had some interesting suggestions and ya'll were just too pedantic to engage with them. Let's talk about how we can unlock value in firms. It helps everyone. Partners can keep their profits (and perhaps even grow them), and associates can retain their sanity. Leads to lesser attrition and lesser time on "training". And yet, we don't even have a conversation on how to make the model more efficient.

Hahahaha... The false hype we, as a society, build around exams.

If you clear CLAT and get into a good school, and then
If you work hard in class, and
If you intern hard from the get-go, and
If you do some little bit of writing, or mooting, or debating, etc. to build a rounded CV, and
If you also forge meaningful networks with your peers and seniors and teachers, and
If you sit for placements...

You'll get in, irrespective of The Board exams happening or not on time or you scoring 63.2% or 91.8%!

The lockdown has made it even worse. With no friends or relatives who can come meet you - because of the lockdown and because you may have COVID too - it becomes unbearable to deal with the loss alone. The questions of how to start a new life with your surviving parent feels too tough to figure out.

Recently came across a report on Indian Law Firms' Billing Rates Survey done by IBLJ in 2019. The report is available at https://law.asia/indian-law-firm-billing-rates/

SAM was the only tier 1 firm who participated in the survey, but I believe the billing rates would be somewhat similar across all tier 1s, and hence the calculations here will be an extrapolation from SAM's figures. Anyway, here are some interesting figures from the survey:

SAM's Hourly Billing Rates (in USD):

Junior Associate: 200 - 290
Senior Associate: 325- 400
Junior Partner: 425 - 450
Senior Partner: 450 - 500
Managing Partner: 550 - 750

The report also specifies the firm-wise split between hourly billing arrangments vs. alternative (i.e. lump sum) billing arrangements. SAM hasn't provided its data on this, but smaller firms like Spice Route, Rajani, Parinam have 60%-75% of their total revenue coming in from hourly billing arrangements. For the sake of calculation, let's make a conservative assumption that SAM's (or any other tier 1) also has 60% of its total revenue coming in from hourly billing arrangements. Also, let's assume that the revenue coming in from alternative billing arrangements would be 50% of what the firm would have otherwise earned had it followed the hourly billing arrangement.

Let's do the calculation for A0s. Let's assume a 10 hour workday for 24 days of the month. Of this, 6 hours will be spent on hourly billing work (60% of 10), and the remaining 4 hours on assignments which have alternative billing arrangements. With the above assumption that alternative billing arrangements would only yield 50% of the revenue that would have otherwise been earned had it been based on hourly basis, we'll add only 2 of these 4 hours to our calculations (Note: I do know that Associates also spend quite a bit of time on non-billable matters like knowledge management, but I've discounted for that by assuming a 10 hour workday with 6-7 days off each month, which is hardly the case at any tier 1. Thus, for the calculation, I will use an 8 hour workday.

Thus, the annual revenue generated by an A0 at a Tier 1 for her/his firm will be:

= 200 (USD) * 70 (Exchange Rate, USD to INR) * 8 (hours per day) * 24 (working days per month) * 12 (months)

= INR 3,22,56,000 (Three Crore Twenty Two Lakhs Fifty Six Thousand Rupees)

In 2019, the best A0 at any tier 1 would have at most gotten INR 16 lpa including bonus. This would be 5% of the revenue generated by the A0 for the firm during the year. Your firm takes a 95% cut of the revenue generated by you. Yes, we are underpaid. Don't let the extra 2-3 lakhs of bonus, or the free vaccines make you feel like you're firm's management is the most generous employer in the world.

In a completely different universe, Onlyfans takes a 20% cut from it's models' revenues, Youtube takes 30% from Superchats, OML takes 30% from its artists, and Stripchat takes 50%. I know this doesn't serve a relevant context at all, but I just found it interesting anyway.

P.S. This report was published in 2019, and the billing rates may have increased by 10%-15% by now.

Every response in this thread assumes "Litigation" to be starting a chamber/firm on your own (and consequently entailing a lot of struggle). Let me offer a slightly different perspective.

There are a lot of firms now that focus entirely on dispute resolution. You are in court everyday, dealing with a variety of cases in different forums (ranging from District consumer forums to Arbitral Tribunals with former SC/HC judges dealing with complex arbitrations). The best part? You are also paid a decent salary.

Let me give you an example. I have always been fascinated with litigation and most things that come with it. I graduated from an NLU, and started out with one such firm. Of course the pay was much lesser than what my peers at Tier-1 firms (both in the Corporate and Dispute Resolution teams) were making but it was definitely something with which I could easily survive and even save a bit (since I was staying at home). The advantage to working at such firms though is the level of responsibility you get while handling matters, and the amount of learning. You appear a lot more before court, gradually get to handle important stages of smaller cases and also the level of involvement in deciding strategy etc is much higher than it is in big firms.

Please don't be discouraged by the answers in this thread. Its a different matter if you genuinely enjoy being a transactional lawyer - but if you're doing it only for the money and the promised lifestyle in exchange for a career in litigation you'd have loved, I assure you there are other options. Yes, you may take a few years longer to see 1 Cr as your savings, yes you may only be able to afford a economy ticket and 3 star accommodation for your trip abroad as opposed to business class tickets and 5 star accommodation, but I'd say its a fair bargain to exchange those in return for actually wanting to get up and going to your office for the work that's in store (as opposed to doing it only to ensure that the lakhs hit your account without any deductions at the end of the month).

The joys this profession can bring is immense, and if you make the right decisions, you really don't have to starve to enjoy it.

I graduated in 2014. Placed from campus at a tier 1, worked for 6 months, then went independent and have been independent ever since. If I may offer a perspective, do consider the following:

1. What is it that you value the most? If it is anything other than a genuine fascination with litigation, you may find the grind of the initial years debilitating.

2. Be prepared for exigencies. As highlighted in some of the comments above, litigation won't offer you an immediate financial independence or disposable income, so exigencies such as the ongoing covid will hit you hard.

3. Your personal life will suffer. Even timing wise, between courts and chamber and briefings and client chasing, you'll be even busier than your corporate peers. So forget about being in a meaningful relationship, spending quality time with parents, etc, without any immediate corresponding financial rewards.

4. This is relevant if your friends and family are in no way associated with the profession. Your childhood, college friends will move on with their lives while you'll still be dependent on your parents, atleast for the first couple of years. It may feel like that you're against the world, so be prepared to be emotionally strong.

5. Eventually, with some luck and networking, you'll see the value of your struggles, both profesionally and financially, within 6-7 years. The satisfaction is beyond anything you'll ever experience at a law firm. You'll be happy.

I would like to add my 2 cents here. When filling out the CLAT preference list, I filled it like everyone else: NLS, NALSAR, NUJS etc. in that order. After CLAT scores were released but we were still waiting for our ranks, I could tell from the analysis done by coaching centres that I would get either NALSAR or NUJS. This is when it struck me that I did not want to go to NALSAR at all. As a kid who had lived in a metropolitan city all his life, the prospect of living in a campus "in the middle of nowhere" for 5 years seemed ghastly and I started dreading getting NALSAR. Thankfully, my CLAT rank wasn't good enough for NALSAR and I was allotted NUJS. I just wanted to tell this so that aspirants look at other factors too while deciding on a college beyond what is followed by the herd.

Just to point out, you can be different from me and might prefer to live in a campus surrounded by nature, and for that NALSAR is an amazing college and NUJS is as detached from nature as possible.

Okay, so let me share my exp.

I started CS after I joined law school. Completed Foundation during my 2nd Sem. Completed Executive by the end of my 6th Sem. Enrolled in CS Professional cleared 6 out of 8 papers by my 8th Sem - but never completed the course - even after 7-8 years from enrollment. Do not even intend to complete.

Why did I not complete?
I chose my calling/ sub-set in the legal profession where CS served no practical purpose. Knowledge is always welcome but the degree is not required. So never bothered to pursue and complete. Do not see any use in future as well.

Why did I even start then?
Someone told me CS will better my employment opportunity. Had a lot of free time.

Pros & Cons (to the extent of time I was pursuing the course).

Pros: Was something in addition to the regular law course. Always allowed me to know something more. Was always a plus point on the CV for securing internships. Helped me score really good marks in my law subjects like Corporate Laws and Tax.

Cons: Takes some time and effort but very much a doable course along with law. Don't see any cons as such. Also do not think I would have done anything more worthwhile if I had not enrolled in CS. Maybe I would have put in the time and effort in CS 1.6 (which I still did!).

A0 - zero/negative to 5L
A1 - zero / negative to 10L
A2 - zero to 20L
A3 - 5L to 35L
SA1 - 10L to 60L
SA2 - 10L to 80L
PA1 - 20L to 120L
PA2 - 30L to 150L
PA3/ Counsel - 50L to 170L
AP1 - 70L to 200L
AP2 - 70L to 250L
AP3 - 100L to 280L
AP4 - 100L to 350L
EP - 150L to 500L+
EP for > 5 years - 20 - 50 cr

For Blr discount these figures by 5-10%
For tier 2 firms discount by 10-20%
For tier 3 firms and below discount by 20-40%

For US LLM subtract 50-85L + year not worked
For UK LLM subtract 25-30L + year not worked
For EU / Asia LLM subtract 15-20L + year not worked

Before 2010 batch who invested more than 50% in real estate: add zero
Before 2010 who invested more than 50% in equities: add 20-25% of overall figure
Before 2010 who didn’t invest at all / had EMIs to pay: subtract 20-25% of overall figure

IDIA's Mumbai chapter used to organise those annual football tournaments for fundraising. If you're serious about this, maybe you can get in touch with someone from the chapter. They'll be interested to organise it, given that they haven't been able to raise any funds through the football tournament for the last couple of years.

when you realise that you are the "game" and your partner is the "player". Thats the only kind of gaming one has endured.

Genre-

FPS(First Person Shooting)- to dodge the volley of bullets from the partner and take one for the partner in front of the client when needed. Its a different "Call of the Duty" here.

On a serious note, gaming improves your motor skills and enhances cognitive abilities so you can multi-task with ease.

gaming can also be perceived as a medium to vent out the frustration of dealing with nitpicking bosses.

Continuing from previous comment, to answer queries specifically:

1. Depends entirely on the transaction going on. I was staffed on a massive DD, but I know others who interned after me who did not have much work, because a big transaction wasn't going on at the time.

2. This team has really nice people, super helpful. Always approach the senior people as a rule, since their feedback will matter more. Generally, Partners don't interact with interns directly. If you are lucky enough to do so, make the most out of it they can get you an interview if they like you.

3. Getting a callback is tough logistically, because there's no HR and therefore no centralised system processing therefore this will in effect be a contact internship as far as means go. The date of your internship depends on the person pushing for it. Example: Jan & Dec are the months with most internship applications, therefore if a Partner pushes for a callback then you have more chances than if an SA/Associate pushes for it in the same time. There is no preference for callbacks as such. Coming to the PPO, they typically only give it in 5th year as they don't know their hiring requirements so far in advance, although there have been exceptions. Again, since there is no HR, it is incumbent upon you to be in constant touch with your team to ask about this, and if you know there's a vacancy and they like you they will call you for an interview. However you have to keep asking about it, building a good rapport with your team members is critical especially at AZB Noida since there's no HR and your callback and PPO interview is dependant on the team taking out time and actively pushing for both.

Good luck!

I would also like to add

Tool - entire discography (trust me its that good especially Lateralus)
The Strokes - entire discography (especially their debut album Is This It)
Radiohead - Kid A, OK Computer, In Rainbows (albums)
Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf (entire album), make it wit chu, I sat by the ocean (songs)
Led Zeppelin - I and IV (albums)
Bill Withers - Lovely Day, Ain't No Sunshine (songs)
Tame Impala - again entire discography

These are just off the top of my head, I can share my spotify playlist if you want :)

As somebody who loves 80s and 90s music, I don't agree that music and and lyrics need to be politically correct these days. That could be true about mainstream music but there is abundant music with the brashness and rebelliousness of the 90s - it is just difficult to find it because of the sheer quantity of music that gets released every day. Having said that, here is a list (was hard work typing out all this on a working weekend, so please give these a listen):

Third Eye Blind - most of their first three albums
Foo Fighters - any damn thing! (My Hero, Everlong, Monkey Wrench, Times Like These) - all their new albums still have that attitude - and the music videos are as cool
Pavement - Spit on a Stranger
Deftones
Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence
Collective Soul - Shine
Alice in Chains - Would, Man in the box
Sepultura - Ratamhatta
Queens of the Stone Age - No one knows, go with the flow
Veruca Salt - All Hail Me
Kyuss - Demon Cleaner
Smashing Pumpkines - 1979
Audioslave - any ducking thing

These are a few that come to mind. Please also share yours.

Hey - so the best way to do this is to get hold of email IDs of the HRs. You could also apply to the the offices you'd like to work with (that shouldn't be a problem since it's all virtual).

After applying, if you don't get a response, try following up with the HR over phone. You can try emailing as well.

These are the ways, in my opinion.

Last resort - Networking or Cold Emails.

I hope this helps and you get a slot. Good luck!

P.S. Prepare for two rounds of technical interviews as well. xD

"It is in this vein that H.M. Seervai ends the third volume of his celebrated treatise on the constitutional law of India. Indian law scholars would be more than justified if they altogether ignored all that Seervai has to say. For, Seervai writes and thinks as if there is no worthwhile writing by Indian scholars on the subject of constitutional and administrative law. He also totally ignores reasoned scholarly criticism of his positions and thereby shows that he considers it beneath his dignity to join issues with academic lawyers. Seervai compounds this affront to Indian scholarship by his unmitigated Anglophilism. He has no hesitation in citing the less eminent and more obscure British and American scholars. It is only in India that a person so insular in his approach to indigenous juristic learning and thought can be called a "jurist" and his work hailed as "classic""

Wow Baxi really hates the man being called an academic

Kian, the list is finally out on the P&H HC website (https://highcourtchd.gov.in/sub_pages/left_menu/publish/advocates/Senior%20Advocates_28052021.pdf)
Total 19 people have been given the senior gown.
Wishing all of them the very best. Cheers

Honestly, it is also untrue that you will earn a lot more in London. The cost of living is way too much in London. Taxes take away more than 35% of your annual income, compared to almost 7-8% for Indian lawyers. Plus, you will earn bare enough to live during 2 years of TC and just a living stipend for 2 years earlier during the course of SQE. You will have to get a decent amount of money from your parents for 2 years of SQE study. Mind you, your expenditure for these 2 years will be very high as living in London is very expensive compared to other towns like Oxfordshire or Cambridge. Plus, compare the A0 salary of a Magic circle associate with an SA1 in an Indian law firm (Basically that means 4 years out of law school). You will find Indian lawyers will be earning way more in terms of purchasing power of their salary.

I understand that there is a glory associated with a Magic Circle lawyer but there would hardly be any sensitive lawyer who would think an MC A0 is better than SA at a big law firm in India. If you return back to India, unlike what most others think, Indian law firms discount their PQE simply because the first 4 years of their service do not count as PQE. Imagine coming back to India and working as an associate under a partner who was your batchmate. However, most of them do not come back and slog as associates for years without even knowing if they will make partners.

Prospects of making a partner are very bleak. You have very few prospects of a lateral shift in any other firm in London because most of them (Especially big US firms in London) prefer Oxbridge candidates only.

I fail to understand why people with such good intelligence still prefer MC firms over Indian ones.

Since NLS is so great and every third conversation is about NLS, I thought as fellow worshipers we must pay due homage and have a separate conversation just to acknowledge the greatness of our leader. I shall start:

The land of Naharbhavi is so great that when Sudhir stepped on it, vo sudhar gaya. NLS students are deemed as professors by students of tier 2 NLUs. NLS being called Harvard of the east is false and Harvard is actually the NLS of the west. Harvard is considering dropping all other programmes other than law just to meet this expectation. When NLS conducted its own exam, even JEE and Medical aspirants appeared for it. NLS recruits from 8-9 partners from trilegal campus on Day 0. Herbert Smith Freehill offered a training contract to everyone in NLS but everyone was already trained so they didn’t go. Deutsche bank stopped recruiting from NLS because NLS students are gold man. NLS students, even in their childhood, raise both of their parents. NLS won the Oxford Price moot but gave it up for NLUD because it was not worth it. If an NLS student’s phone rings while he is mooting, the moot is paused till the call is over. If an NLS student misquotes an article of the constitution of india in an exam, the constitution is amended. SAM and CAM were separated because NLS kids found their jobs too monotonous. Once an NLS kid was asked by his mother to bring a fan from Khaitan company, he returned with a job offer. NLS was actually constructed in 1456 BC but it was destroyed by Mughals only for it to be built later. When ancient NLS students decided to mass bunk university on two days, those two days were called Saturday and Sunday. An NLS kid gave F grade to one of their professors because they didn’t have 3 post graduate degrees from Ivy league but only 2. NLS does not want any Rhodes scholarships now because they belong to the sky. 36 law students from NLS went missing in the jungles of Nagarbhavi, they were later called the avengers. When NLS kids come to your college for a competition, they confer winners with the trophy. The apple thrown on Newton was actually thrown by an NLS student because he wanted the world to get a small portion of the knowledge he owned. NLS student was giving a speech which was noted in text by the britishers, that speech is called the Indian Penal Code. When mails were invented and an NLS student created his email id, he already had 9 job offers from tier 1 firms. When an NLS student finally becomes a parent, their kid is designated as a senior advocate by the supreme court. When Indian govt go to the court against NLS, it’s them vs the Union of NLS. Once NLS decided to not admit any students for a year, 80000 more people appeared for JEE that year.

I should be working sigh
But anyway, here it goes.

The answer, as is typical with us lawyers, is that it depends. A, on what you want. B, where you're located. And C, where you're coming from.

For the purposes of this answer, I'm speaking in context of lower judicial services and the IAS/IPS. No point speaking of IRS/IDAS/Whatever - there are too many varying factors. Foremost being that they are not limited by any cadre; judicial services are limited to your state.
Also, my answer is mostly Delhi-specific.

What do you want?

The work culture, the lifestyle, everything is very different. An entry level IAS/IPS officer posted in district (as opposed to HQ/Secretariat) - SDM/DM/ACP/DCP - gets a car with a beacon, a PSO, cars with huge boards saying 'District Magistrate' or a flag on the bonnet. Typical things that an IAS aspirant thinks of. You know what I mean.

Not so with judges. In Delhi, entry-level judicial officers don't have any official vehicles to take them from home to court. Go to Tis Hazari judges parking, you'll see i10s and Swifts with a judge sticker on them. Now I'm not saying it's a bad thing, or that everyone should aim for that laal batti. But know what you want, what you're getting into. I've seen judicial officers get visible agitated and frustrated simply because an IAS officer (who they believe to be inferior in rank) gets more perks.
Judges in Delhi also don't get PSOs, drivers. On some days, not enough stenographers even. It's tough to manage work that way. In other states, however, I've heard judges through all the ranks get a driver-cum-PSO at least.

On the other hand, judges have far more relaxed work timings. Court starts at 10 in Delhi (in other states, don't bother coming before 11/11:30), you wind up by 3-ish, do chamber work/prepare for next day, go home. Not so for an IAS/IPS posted in district. You're basically on duty 24x7. Reaching home at 9PM, and immediately rushing back to work at 9:30 because of an emergency is not uncommon, especially in IPS.

The actual work that you have to do is very different too. A district posting is basically crisis management all of the time. You're always running, having meetings, trying to solve some thing or the other (except in the occasional times when things are relaxed between crises). In a non-district posting as well, it's a desk-job but still it is common to have frequent travel (for meetings), and last-minute work (say, because your predecessor forgot to prepare a status report for the case listed in HC tomorrow, and now you're calling different HODs at 7PM trying to get the relevant documents from them). On the other hand, as a judge, you sit and adjudicate cases all day. It can get boring and dull. Evidence being recorded for hours and hours straight. Sub-par arguments that you HAVE to listen because the guy arguing is the Bar President. Same thing day-in-day-out.
So it really depends on your aptitude.

Big establishments (luxury hotels, businesses, hospitals) also oblige you if you're an IAS/IPS. Judges, not so much (and really, think about it, there are over 150 DJS officers posted in just Tis Hazari alone; there are five other court complexes in Delhi, whereas there are less than 20 DCPs.) However, when an IAS/IPS is summoned to court, he'll have to listen to whatever absurd rant the judge goes on with a bowed head and (figuratively) folded hands. It's not uncommon for a 20-something M.M. to be scolding a 40+ ACP/DCP, often unnecessarily. As an IPS officer, you have to live with it.
So again, know what you're getting into, what your motivations are. Not knowing this will just lead to frustration, and you'll never really be happy with whatever you get into.

Where are you located?
Court infrastructure is minimal outside Delhi. I've been to subordinate courts outside Delhi, and courts of even ASJs and Special Judges (CBI) don't have working computers. A stenographer writes by hand the evidence that gets recorded. On the other hand, Delhi district courts are quite advanced infrastructurally.

On the other hand, judges have more respect/power in states outside Delhi. There will be huge sign boards simply saying "District Judge Residence" - if that's any signifier of where things stand by comparison. In Delhi no one cares/knows where you live. And it makes sense also, if you think of it. In Delhi, there are 11 District Judges, and the HC and SC are also here. In a state, there's no one above the DJ in that particular district. So unless the administrative judge is visiting, you're the king. At the same time, there is greater attempts at political interference as well in states.

Promotions also differ. Some lower judicial services officers in Delhi will never reach become the DJ, let alone a HC judge. Forget about it. On the other hand, in some states (do your research), the promotions are faster and it's much more streamlined.

Where are you coming from?
I know of people whose parents are IAS/IPS (direct as well as promotee) who did not appear for subordinate judiciary exams because they believed it to be "beneath" them. Now, I don't mean to demean the noble job, but it's a genuine perception. They wish to move "up in the ladder" and joining lower judicial services meant a stagnation for them, socially. Their friends, similarly placed socially because of the background, would be "higher up in the society." For e.g., the friend whose father is a HC judge would be elevated from the Bar and become his boss. If you feel this kind of thinking could creep into your mind, make sure you factor this in while making any decision.

------

Lastly, as far as your comment that judges remain in touch with law while civil servants don't, that's only partly true. While the exposure to law won't be as much as a judge, a civil servant does remain in touch. When posted in district, IPC, CrPC, CPC and a number of other (major) Acts are regularly used. And if you're an IPS, all the criminal statutes, obviously. When posted in HQ/Secretariat, you're in touch with a number of other things - service law, for e.g., will always be there. If you're in a municipal corporation, the municipal laws; if deputed to some special department, the relevant laws there.

Hope this helps.

Neither of these things but neck pain, back pain and newly added feature knee pain kaafi hai. Been buying ergonomic products (which I used to think are a fad) increasingly to deal with it. I have somewhat started disliking my chair and by extension my work because of it because I didn't sign up for geriatric knees

Hi,

All I can say is:

1. Read as much as you can. Read whatever comes to your hand. Pay more focus on things which people miss. Read website T&Cs, Press Releases, Public apologies, the fine lines, and the bylines. It will give you an idea as to how to communicate. Professional writing is very easy to pick up if you are habitual of reading such drab. It is a skill which is highly valued and comes extremely handy.

2. Talk. Every opportunity that you get. Retort. More you talk, more will you be prepared to talk your way out of or into situations. Gift of gab is not just nature's gift. It can also be cultivated. Being able to talk fluently will open a lot of doors for you. It is especially useful to further your career. You will land more clients as a lawyer, lawyers and students will respect you as judges, people will listen to you more in general.

3. Write. A fluent speaker will not always be a good writer. Donald Trump is a great speaker, have you ever seen him write? Modi / RaGa have great speech writers, can they deliver it like Modi? Writing is very important. you may not always get an opportunity to speak up in a professional setting. More often than not, your written work would almost always reach more places. Learn to write so well that it catches everyone's eyes.

4. Learn to understand the situation. Don't tinker if you can't afford. If something is being done in one way, till you can afford such things going south, stick to the tried and tested method. Everyone knows that latin terms and ancient english is replaceable in law firm drafts / transaction documents. While some have discarded it, many haven't. As long as you are with someone who wants things to be done in a particular manner, learn to do it in that manner, unless you can afford to leave [Leave and find your own space]. If you are in a corporate team you will be required to proofread. understand what proofreading means. It is not about improving, it is only about correcting.

5. Speak up. If you want something, ask for it. If you want an internship, call the HR after mailing them in case of no positive reply. Ask them about how you can secure an internship. If they tell you no slots available, mail again for some other slot. Slots are available available. Ensure that you have an error free and well formatted CV and cover letter for application. See templates available on Harvard's website. I guess Lawctopus had some too when I was in college. There are plenty of other websites which have templates. Just Google. Talk to your seniors about how to go about things. Reach out to your college seniors who are known to be helpful. There is no shame in asking for help.

6. Research. Learn how to research. Best advise for life. Learn about keywords, search tools etc. Learn how to and where to use Near, And, or, "", -, +, site:, filetype: etc. Learn navigating through websites, looking for things on websites. Learn how to use keywords so that you never get more than 2-3 Google search result pages. It will make you a rockstar researcher.

Expand your horizons and have an open mind. Be professional, be courteous and stay humble. Easy to brag after a win, but with every win, the level increases and it gets more difficult to maintain your reputation as the person who can find it.

Intern wherever you can once. At max twice. Never for more than 8 weeks in total. If they want to hire you, they will. Don't waste your time hoping that an A0 or A1 will get you a job. People below SA level in a law firm don't have that pull.

Once you start interning, try to establish your presence. Be subtle and humble. Don't be known for your flashiness. Build a good rapport. 1 week before your internship, seek time to talk to a senior with whom you have a good rapport. Tell them that you want a job and want to work at the firm / with the team. If you are good, you will get an interview for sure from places like SAM, CAM etc. if you are from a decent college. If you are from some unknown / private college, you need to work twice as hard.

Good luck!
towards the end o

Your question is wrong PA and MA is not equivalent across firms. Khaitan and CAM make PA after 6 years PQE and Luthra makes MA after 6 years PQE, whereas SAM makes PA after 7 years PQE. Trilegal doesn't have PA/MA, but a designation called counsel for 7 years PQE. AZB doesn't have an equivalent - they make SA at 5 yrs PQE and straight partner after that at 9-10 yrs PQE. Not aware of the situation at JSA and other firms.

So a better question would be "what is the pay for 6 years and 7 years PQE respectively at these firms? Hope people can contribute and answer this.

Hi Human & fellow readers,

I am graduating this year from a non-top 5/6 NLU college which has not done well with campus placements (only 7 students were placed through the college RCC - less than 5% of the total batch). However, many of my batchmates who were interested in the law firm scene have been able to get themselves offers from pretty good places. Some also realized that this was not their cup of tea and chose to pursue other alternatives and are doing equally well. After several internships at firms both top tier and some not, I was able to get an offer in my final semester from a great team at a growing law firm.

I completely understand how you feel right now. You might not feel like it but you are strong enough to overcome these feelings of anxiety which all of us have somewhat experienced. Don't be morose, keep applying - apply to firms and partners showing your interest in their practice areas. If you want it bad enough, opportunities will come your way. Be sincere and diligent - that will be enough for you to get your foot in the door.

And who says you even have to like law firms - your experience at internships might make you want to pursue other stuff. Law firms are not the all important be-all-end-all avenue the rat race might make them to seem. There are enough other opportunities where you can do equally well, if not more. I'm sure you're parents will also understand if you dialogue with them.

A friend shared this with me -

For there is always light
If we are brave enough to see it
If we are brave enough to be it

Best of luck!

Lets get you somewhere,

Assuming you are from a decently reputed university (falling as low as DSNLU or Nirma/Christ), lets plan out your future step by step:

Academics

If nothing is working for you, make the most basic thing work. Focus here, and get in top five-ten in the university if possible. Traditionally and even in future, I do not see better proof of grit and diligence than being excellent at academics at a decently reputed university. Being good at academics is baseline key to success. For example: let us assume you have a terrible contracts professor or the curriculum is bad - a student who wishes to do well would go to the e-library, read from additional sources plus scrounge the internet for good resources and structure your thoughts well. This is killing two birds with one stone - aceing your academics with ease and clearing your basic understandings.

[i]Do not underestimate this, do not underestimate the time required to do this properly and do not like 95% of law students underestimate the importance of consistency and grit.[/I]

Outside Academics

You need to prove three skills outside your academic achievements: (i) communication; and (ii) networking.

Communication refers to your writing and speaking skills, i.e. write articles, blogs on leading blogs like Indiacorplaw, Oxford Business Law Blog, etc. I do not particularly give weightage to academic writing, because that may not expose your thoughts to a wider audience. Identify your focus area - lets assume it is corporate law, start browsing business new websites and start writing 500-1000 word updates on the latest news item (maybe for mediocre or even low grade blogs/or the best audience - yourself)/alternatively to match your academic targets, just write a updated essay on whatever you discussed in class and latest jurisprudence on the matter. Keep a watch a law firm updates (NDA, CAM, SAM, etc.), to understand how to write, the style of writing and update your writing structure. At the beginning, aim to write 10-15 pieces (small and big) each month. [I built my personal online commentary through this, I often see myself referring back to my class notes - I spent max 3-4 hours, since it was personal - I plagiarised giving weight to understanding > credentials, but I had no loans.] For oral communication, you may identify speaking opportunities within group, classes, debate tournaments, or if nothing else, moots. (Moots is always on expense of time - which you are lacking. It is an excellent learning activity, but not the key to success. I suggest that you do not get distracted by the excitement and lose valuable months).

Communication will automatically help you build research skills (as you think about each word you put out to the world); articulation (key to being a lawyer and negotiator); and often in networking (as you have credentials of being well published - even if it is 100 of 250 words post). Practice will make you perfect and often help with academics automatically.

Networking: I use this term in the most balanced way possible, and not necessarily only for work, skill, reasons. Within law school life, you needs balance, and relationships with seniors, juniors and batchmates are key. Help everyone selflessly, connect people, party with people, hang out with people, build groups, play amongus with interested batch mates, sports!, but be among people. These people are going to be your seniors in firms, your clients, your referrals, your mentors, and your guides. In addition, identify lawyers active on social media, that you look up to and observe the content being put out, keep a track. If you follow communication above, lawyers who connected with you might have already come across your posts and (probably are already impressed).

Internships and Jobs

There are two ways to go about it, (i) excel and go for the tier 1, easy to get in with top law school and they look favorably on top rankers;(ii) realise your interest (writing/communication above helps), identify and reach out to professionals working independently or in boutique setups (please let them be top lawyers, well known and good pedigree with good mandates - legallyindia is a good start to find for corp) or starting out.

For (i) - lot depends on your college; for (ii) lot depends on your zeal and hustle. (ii) is also easy to secure, with less noise and competition. Once you have a step in a practice area, it is not rocket science to elevate to tier 1 (if that is your intention/goal/dream), or you may love the job and seeing your talent, you may be offered equivalent pay with better work life.

Know this - everybody who is hardworking, good, finds a job. Actually - everyone who wants to work for someone else, gets to work for someone else. Internship or no internship, moot or no moot, no research paper - if you know your basics, are articulate, you will score a job easily.

Please use resources like 'worldwise' for this - not the course, the resource on the website of worldwise is enough.

For you and your dad - on loans

Clarify to your parents upfront - the news is misleading, outside top five, people don't get guaranteed 12 LPA jobs. (difficult even in top three). Tell them you are doing your best, and loan is not going to be a concern (in ANY case - law degree is rewarding).

Legal profession, is highly rewarding to good talents who are consistent, hard working and can go to the extra mile. Even a person starting out at 40K in tier three in Mumbai, if talented can make 1L by the end of his 2nd year in practice (if he wants to sacrifice life balance). Your loan of 30 lakh (assuming you are in JGLS or alike) will look mediocre and tensions small. Worst case scenario - you apply to 60 places, get rejected with no job for six month (highly and extremely unlikely - will happen only if you don't compromise on 12LPA standards), your degree will allow you to pivot - to legal tech, content writing, teaching, LLP, public policy advocacy, etc. among hundred other options.

You will only need - positive mindset, confidence and hustling to succeed.

I am not from a top 5 NLU, although I am from a decently reputed university. I am reaching my fourth year and haven’t really done any internships due to the pandemic and all my applications were either not replied or rejected. I don’t know the insides of a law firm. I remember when I was giving CLAT how motivated I was about law and everything. I did pretty good in college and was moving with the flow. I thought my university had good placements but like most of you, when I arrived, i got to know the dark truth. I am clueless as my dad who took an education loan to fund my education sits beside me and tells me how he plans to repay the debt along with me because “i am a bright kid and I’ll get placed at a nice place”. Now that I look at myself, even I realise that with no practical knowledge, I would be an asset to no firm. I realise that I might not just have a job after two years. I think of it everyday. I text people on linkedin and other places but no one really helps and that’s understandable. I think stress is making me bald and giving me dark circles too. People fight a lot and if you could treat each other better but a lot of you are really sweet too.

I don’t know how to cope with this feeling. There must be others like me. How do you deal with this feeling? How do you deal with rejections on a daily basis? How do you feel about your parents who think you’ll be getting a 12lpa soon? How do you deal with everything? I want to come out as a stronger person

Welcome to the most secular trend in global political economy. You can join the grievance line right behind the industry-line workers. Joking. Wages have far departed/decoupled from the ever increasing productivity. Its a serious concern that is eating up the services economy as well. There is nothing you can do about it besides, of course, organize and put forward demands like how it used to be but lets be realistic; for each one who organizes, there are 100s who are willing to replace them.



[Moderator note: graph via OECD (https://www.oecd.org/media/oecdorg/directorates/economicsdepartment/eo2018/eonov2018/median%20wages%20nov%202018%20eo.svg)]

There's also the fat-shaming, the cultural appropriation played for laughs (Monica with braids) and other things that seem innocuous but may not hold up to today's standards. It's still fun and a lot better than Sex and the City. But I'll forever be a Seinfeld fan. I think it holds up very well. They didn't discriminate - everyone was a horrible person and made fun of. I take exception of course the mocking of Elaine's bad dancing. People with two left feet are people too!

The way this works is that lead investor signs a termsheet and commences FDD and LDD. Thereafter, the Investment Banker leading the deal introduces another investor to participate. And another. The "other investors" sign up on the same terms as the lead investor. What happens when an additional investor joins in is that the lead investor progressively gets diluted. Therefore, they want to close the deal fast to ensure that the Promoters don't keep adding investors. To ensure this efficiency all investors use the same lawyers because having 4 set of lawyers with everyone showboating their value add becomes a very inefficient process and the deal can get prolonged, or worst fall.

Not to take anything away from AZB's market standing, but this is how the process works.

There were other options. Had you been aware of crypto trading and how it worked together with other wallets, both national and international like Paypal, then it might have made better sense to you. You can join any of the several Indian crypto communities if you really want to know of the available options. The RBI ban was largely ineffective insofar as people who knew what they were doing were concerned.

There are many platforms for trading. I personally use CoinDCX, because it does not impose any fee on deposit/withdrawal. As Kian said, do not invest anything that you won't be okay with losing. Do not try to hold on to your investment for long unless you have got strong nerves, because of the occasional crash and strong fluctuations. If you want to do daily trading and earn in that way, you would have to be able to devote the necessary time for close monitoring. I myself have averaged a profit of 1000 rupees per day from trading over the last two years by investing an original amount of 10000. After about a month, I withdrew the original 10000, and thereafter took greater risks. However, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. The current crash has not caused too much loss for me, and if you study the movements of many other currencies apart from the usual BC, Ethereum etc., and then spread your trading accordingly, then you can stay ahead of the market for the most part. I did have to spend an hour and a half daily to be able to do whatever I said.

Can speak for arbitration and insolvency, working in a solicitor firm and frequently briefing counsels on our mandates.

Junior Counsels:
1. Karl Tamboly
2. Sarosh Bharucha
3. Akshay Kolse Patil
4. Shyam Kapadia
5. Girish Godbole (deserves a senior designation at the earliest)
6. Cyrus Ardeshir
7. Ashish Kamat
8. Chirag Mody
9. Rashmin Khandekar
10. Mayur Khandeparkar
11. Amir Arsiwala
12. Arif Doctor
13. Mihir Mody
14. Mallika Tally
15. Hussain Dholkawala
16. Prateek Seksaria
17. Ankita Singhania
18. Abhinav Chandrachud

Senior Counsels:
1. Aspi Chinoy
2. Janak Dwarkadas
3. Darius Khambata
4. Fredeun De Vitre
5. Shiraz Rustomjee
6. Zal Andhyarujina
7. Sharan Jagtiani
8. Vishal Kanade
9. Mustafa Doctor
10. Virag Tulzapurkar
11. Birendra Saraf
5.

Was asked by a PA to keep an eye on whether two associates (a guy and a girl) were taking breaks together, and how frequently. My desk was near the door and hence people coming in and going out were within my line of sight.

As it turns out, they were. They timed their entries and exits 90 secs apart to be discreet, but I noted this as well. Reminded me of the Dwight-Angela affair from The Office.

As I wasn't working with either of those associates, I didn't have any qualms about ratting them out. Specifically told the PA about the 90 sec rule.

Didn't end up getting a callback anyway, but that might have to do with the fact that I was busy with my own trysts with a co-intern.

I had a senior hand me her phone and say "keep the client occupied" with no context or background. Turns out, I didn't need any. For the next two hours the client regaled me with stories of his family's outing to New Jersey and how he was looking forward to the next shipment of cha masala from Surat so he could make himself tea and pakoras. Senior allowed me to bill him two hours for this.

While a legend like Shuva Mandal doesn’t need any defending (and at the risk of being heavily trolled myself), it was too jarring to see so much hate in the comments to not say anything. Especially as someone who learned so much from working with Shuva. I for one felt he was a great leader. Never tried to impress clients with aggressive timelines at the associate’s cost. He also encouraged associates to front discussions with clients and lead negotiations for their personal growth (versus wanting to be debriefed and lead everything himself).

And for the comments claiming that Zia mollycoddled Shuva to fame – I don’t even know where to start with that one. Mollycoddle just doesn’t fit in the same sentence with these two formidable personalities.

This is not to belittle anyone’s negative experience. This is just to share that my experience was positive and the potential for growth from working with Shuva is infinite. And no, I wasn’t the only freak who felt that way :)

If Big Law /‘law firm’ culture is too toxic, please do start out on your own. Once you’ve mastered winning clients while keeping your team happy, motivated and challenged (not to forget well compensated!), do let us all know what the magic formula is so we can bring out much needed change. It’s a learning curve and so much easier said than done.

Having worked with Rajesh and Simone during my time at NDA + Shuva while at AZB, it is beyond fantastic to see them join forces. Clearly they’ve taken the legal world by storm before they’ve even started. Congratulations!

@Not True: You are the one who deflected the conversation by bringing up Prof. R. Venkata Rao's tenure as NLSIU VC between May 2009-July 2019, when the report is about the new faculty hires at NLS. On the faculty hiring front, it is a fact that RVR did not appoint any teacher on a permanent position during his 10 year tenure. In fact, he advertised these positions twice (in 2013 and 2017) but did not complete the process for reasons that are better known to insiders in the NLSIU Executive Council. He did appoint several people on an ad-hoc or visiting basis which offer no job-security and are severely underpaid positions. A majority of these ad-hoc appointees were incompetent people who did not prepare for their classes, were not able to deliver any meaningful content and nor were they able to understand what students wrote in their projects, let alone give them meaningful feedback. Most of these characters have been weeded out since SK took over in September 2019. Of course, the good ones among the earlier ad-hoc appointees (Kunal Ambasta, Rashmi Venkatesan, Sanyukta Chaudhary, Rahul Choragudi) are continuing at NLS and two of them have been upgraded to permanent positions which were long overdue.

I guess you might be a recent graduate (probably 2009-2014 or after) or current student who seems to be judging RVR through the very limited prism of short-term benefits and concessions given to students. Some of us have much longer institutional memories and do not agree with your characterisation of the RVR regime as a net positive for NLS. Many of the things that you describe as institutional successes (Jessup Win, Placements in Commercial Law Firms, Admissions to prestigious postgraduate programmes, success in Debate and ADR competitions) would have anyway accrued due to the organisational practices, institutional networks and reputational capital that had been accumulating for many years before RVR joined as VC in May 2009. To be specific, NLS had won Jessup as early as 1999 and the 2013 success was more a product of a continued emphasis on the activity among the student body. Please ask the four alums who were part of the 2013 team (Raag Yadava, Geetha Hariharan, Shreya Jain and Akshaya who were in the 2008-2013 batch) about their honest opinion on what RVR did to the college. Recruitments in commercial law firms were bound to be good throughout the 2010s owing to the growing depth of the NLSIU Alumni network. It must be kept in mind that other NLUs such as NALSAR, NUJS, NLU-J and GNLU have also done fairly well in the corporate legal sector, irrespective of the fluctuating quality of their respective Vice-Chancellors. Successes in Competitive Debating and ADR competitions were also the outcome of internal initiatives taken by students through the 2000s which translated into even better results during the 2010s. RVR was smart enough to recognise the strengths of the NLS student body and did not interfere with these existing structures and practices. I also recognise that he regularly supported student participation in co-curricular activities, both in a monetary form and in kind, which is something that did not happen regularly under the previous Directors/VCs.

However, on the academic front, RVR has done serious and incalculable damage, the impact of which will be felt for many years to come. Apart from not hiring faculty members on fair terms, he turned the evaluation process into a joke through the arbitrary use of re-evaluation powers (as repeatedly pointed out by Sid.C in these forums and on the NLSIU Alumni Association FB page). Students who had failed in individual subjects by large margins (getting scores in the 20s and 30s out of 100, largely because they wrote next to nothing in their answer-scripts) would magically be passed at the end of the academic year. The answer-scripts were never sent to any faculty members at other Universities. It was all done at the personal discretion of RVR. Similarly, students who barely attended 40-50% of the classes would have their attendance shortages condoned as soon as they went and touched his feet. RVR would whimsically declare non-instructional days whenever any student group approached him and would just announce blanket extensions for project submission deadlines. He also turned a blind eye towards some faculty members (both senior and junior ones) who were habitually cancelling classes, and were simply handing out easy grades to students in return for their silence. The overall teaching standards had plummeted so much that NLSIU students began to publicly talk about the 'scam' courses in each trimester (please read 'Quirk' or the SBA Pages), openly talking about how they got away with plagiarism in their projects and next to no preparation for their exams. In fact, the teachers who were actually negligent towards their professional responsibilities were given a free rein, whereas those who did their job with integrity were the ones who were regularly targeted. The fact that a few self-motivated students in each batch continued to accumulate academic and co-curricular success throughout the 2010s cannot be used as a mask to hide the widespread rot that had set in. Showing empathy towards students does not mean giving them a free pass to earn popularity in the short-run.

Having said all this, Sudhir has several faults as well. He displayed many of them during the NLAT episode last year and from what I have gathered, he has been unnecessarily rude towards students in internal meetings. However, he seems to be moving in the right direction with proactive faculty hiring (both on a permanent and visiting basis), regular review of course content and the initiation of several externally funded research projects. He needs to acknowledge that he has a problem in communicating with students. So it will be better if he delegates day-to-day administration to younger faculty members who are more sensitive to the evolving needs of the student body. The fact that Mrinal, Aparna, AKT and Nigam will now be there should lead to decision-making that is more considerate towards the needs of students from marginalised socio-economic backgrounds.

Okay, you may not like what you'll hear, but it really depends. There simply are too many variables.

Lots of law students intern at SAM. These days, internships aren't even that selective - which is actually quite unfortunate because it effectively dilutes the quality of the intern pool and makes it harder to get recruited based just on internship performance. It's worth noting that only an extremely small minority will get called back and fewer still get placed. Let that sink in first.

To be considered for a call back, you need to have received very strong positive feedback AND the associate you worked with must have recommended you for a call back while filling out your appraisal form. Similarly, for a PPO, the associate (and the partner to whom he reports) must recommend you. Unless this happens, you can pretty much forget about call back.

Generally, a PPO isn't given to someone who hasn't interned with the firm at least twice, though, I'm sure exceptions exist. Factors that matter are, your law school, grades, performance, attitude while interning etc. Again, not every team looks to hire right out of college (which basically is what a PPO is), so it's best to check with the person who you worked most for what the scene is. Again, how important each of these factors is depends on practice area. Some practice areas/teams aren't as selective, others are.

Reaching out to HR won't help. Without your appraisal being processed, they'll not be able to really do anything.

Hope this helps

So this is an example of the hatred towards JGLS that some people were talking about earlier. I am not from JGLS myself, but I cannot help commenting that you are trying to deliberately start a face-off, and seem quite bitter for no obvious reason. There is nothing objectionable in particular in the comment to which you have objected, and you had to resort to misquote it to prove your point.

Bro in that case I’d suggest two kinds of universities:-

1) BHU/AMU etc- The biggest perk is that they are extremely cheap because everything is subsidised. Attendance is not a huge issue so you would get a lot of time to intern.

2) Delhi/Mumbai based law colleges like lloyd, glc etc - Again attendance is not an huge issue, government funded universities might not cost a lot but the likes of lloyd would cost although i guess that would be within your budget. Since you’re in the hub of litigation, you can actually learn a lot.

One golden tip for getting internships in litigation chambers is that you physically go to there chambers and submit a hard copy of your application with cv and sop. Don’t disturb the senior lawyers, just hand it out to a junior or peon

This seems like a troll question but I’ll pay the tax and give you a straight answer.

Sudhir K is not a corporate tycoon poaching players from other teams. He’s a VC of a public university with limited funds at his disposal. The people he has hired could easily earn two/three times as much if they wanted to- many of them are taking a pay cut going to teach at nls. This also isn’t really about the nls brand- this didn’t happen before Sudhir. So what exactly is Sudhir offering these guys?

I think it comes down to what academics want from their workplace.
1) like all folks in public service, they want to do a job they can be proud of. This means they want freedom within the classroom, to teach as they see fit. This means both the freedom from political censorship, and the freedom to set and enforce rigorous standards. This means that the administration has to inspire confidence that they will back up faculty and not pander to students who want easy grades. They also don’t want to deal with students who seek to bully them. So this means they want to be certain that the student culture is one where students are eager to learn and put in the work.
Sudhir K has a reputation for maintaining high standards in his academic endeavours, this inspires some confidence that being part of the nls experiment maybe worth while.
None of the other VCs really have the same reputation. How many other NLUs have an academic review committee that works to make sure that courses delivered are of the highest quality? And there are so many troubling stories one hears from other NLUs of students running competent faculty out of town because they wanted easy grades.

Students are vulnerable and mental health is a problem - but that doesn’t mean we throw standards out of the window- it means we bolster mental health services so that students can deal with their issues instead of wanting the world to adjust to them.

2) the second thing academics want is to find a home. This means a collegial atmosphere among the faculty, this means feeling like you are a part of something together. And this means you feel valued in the institution. This can be small things like giving faculty decent housing, having weekly faculty meetings/ seminars, encouraging faculty and students to see each other as teammates rather than competitions. And it can also mean big things - the ability to tell the administration when you think something is wrong, being given responsibility and voice within the university. The ability to advocate for our students. Other NLUs simply don’t follow these best practices. And it’s easy for someone to feel alienated when they join as faculty.

3) the third thing academics want is the ability to do their research and advance their career. This means confidence that the administration will encourage and support their research efforts. If someone needs reduced work load so they can interview prisoners across the country- they should be able to get it. If someone applies for a research grant and gets it- they should have confidence that the administration and fellow colleagues will be encouraging.
This also means that you want to work where other good academics work- so that you can collaborate with them. And for younger faculty- this means that senior faculty and VCs are nurturing and want the younger guys to succeed. Sudhir K pushes his younger colleagues to publish, he talks to them about their research projects and tries to help them, when you send him a paper he reads it and gives you comments. He has nurtured and taught so many young people who are now academics in their own right- and there hasn’t been one whiff of allegations of plagiarism or exploitation. Other VCs don’t have this reputation.

Even just looking at how many alumni have returned to nls- it’s interesting to note that nearly all of them have worked with Sudhir or around Sudhir in some capacity or the other. You can dismiss this as nepotism, but you can also recognise that research and institution building is a collaborative excercise. And that Sudhir has nurtured and supported many academics through out his short career. How many other VCs can boast of having a similarly qualified group of people who are willing to follow them? Most of these other Vcs- if they see a bright student or a younger colleague- they try to exploit them, to plagiarise, to bully and generally limit the younger colleagues career so they don’t leave. Sudhir doesn’t do that.

Academics are simple people with simple wants. You give them that- they’ll come flocking to you.

Here is why none of your options will work.
1) visiting professors cannot make up for the poor quality of education you get in your core courses. They also have little investment in the university compared to regular hires.
2) this partnership will never work. Faculty aren’t a resource like money that you can share- they’re people. If someone wants to stay in Bhopal and work there - how are you gonna force them to go work in Gandhinagar? Why would they put up with that?
3) again people who want to work at jgls cannot be forced to go work elsewhere. They are people not things.
4) more money won’t solve the problem- these guys have all already taken pay cuts to work with Sudhir. Why will they be poachable?
5) an NLU alum alone is not enough- this is a culture that needs to change. From senior faculty to students to the library staff - everyone.

If you want your university to be better - you should start by being a better student and by demanding better education.

Based on the discussions on the LI threads, articles and data available online, i have tabulated this table to provide easy reference for law freshers:

Trilegal: 13.2 + 2.2
KCO: 14.4 + 1.8
CAM: 13 + 2
SAM: 15
AZB: 14 + 1.5
L&L: 16
JSA: 11.5 + 1
TTA: 13 + upto 40%(usual 10-20%)
S&R: 13.2 + 3
NDA: 16.2 +1.2
DSK: 10
Induslaw: 12 + 1.2
Lexygen: 15
Veritas: 14
ELP: 8 + 20k
Bharucha: 9 + 1
Pioneer: 9.6
Poovayya: 9
WG: 6.6
HSA: 6
Finsec: 10.8
DMD: 7.8
PDS: 7.8
Rajani: 6-7
Tatva: 6-7
Algo: 6-7.2
Anoma: 4.8 -5.4
Acuity: 9-10
Rajaram: 6-7.2
Juris Legal: 5.4

JSA's Mumbai office follows (or rather used to follow) this approach generally: First they'll offer you a 4-week internship. At the end of your internship, you prepare a worksheet where you write the name of the attorneys you've worked with and the work that you've done for each of them and submit this to HR. HR circulates this sheet to the attorneys to get their feedback on your work. If it's good, you get a callback for a second internship, which could be anywhere between 1-3 months depending on your college's vacations. At the end of this second internship as well, you fill the worksheet and the attorneys review your work. If the feedback is good after the second internship as well (which is quite common), you get the offer.

This is the ideal way this ideally happens as per the firm's HR. However, the Mumbai office is notoriously known for offering long term round-the-year internships to 3rd-4th year students from local colleges that don't have strict attendance rules, and not making them offers until the time they are taking a break for their final semester exams, and sometimes not then either. Though this is not too common, but there are one or two cases every year where an intern who has been interning with the firm for 1-2 years is told that there are no vacancies in the team right at the time when he/she asks for the offer before going on a break for the final exams.

Also, I don't know how much the approach towards internship evaluation has changed since the pandemic started. I interned there for a couple of months last year (March-April), and when the internship ended, we were told by the HR that our worksheets would be shared with the attorneys for evaluation as soon as the office reopened. Afaik, none of the 8-10 of us got a callback, though some got emails from the attorneys that they had worked with saying that they would recommend the intern for a second internship if he/she was interested to intern again.

Why do you have to bring us into this discussion? We are happy that you have a great set of faculty. Kudos to Prof Sudhir for pulling this off despite the constraints under which he has to operate.

That being said, regarding the personalised attention, our class sizes are around 50-60 despite the large batch size and in elective it can be as less as than 10 students. The faculty-student ratio has in fact improved over the years from 1:15 to 1:9. I could go on head to head on star faculty but the only thing that will achieve here is unpleasantness and nothing else.

Ignore the anonymized comments posted here. Nobody in their right mind at JGLS is of the opinion that NLSIU is not a great institution. You should be happy with what you have. Despite, the popular perception, we are not idiots, we do have different preferences and we are happy with what we have here at JGLS. Why turn this into a bitter competition unnecessarily?

GLC has been a good college before but not it's just in shambles.

Reasons

Mumbai University(MU)- just like India were fragile and helpless under British rule, same is with GLC, Mumbai has made sure that such GLORIOUS institution is destroyed.
Imagine having the legacy of 165+ years and be like this. It is the complete failure of the Maharashtra Government and Central Government to not make this alike to contemporary Law schools in India and create an institute of eminence.
Having studied in College where GOATs have studied and now just any other building in Churchgate.
The syllabus is older than Elizabeth queen. The same old method of cramming and mugging all of it and spit it out in an answer sheet on the D-day of examination and hey if your writing and luck are in your favor, you're topper of the Uni.
This institution is only alive because of its students. While the state reservation is way too much but still nevertheless most bunch of people are good to do.

Committees- This is the only a good thing about GLC, to be honest, so you can see the standard. The only way you can create a network or else you're gone for life if you do not join any committee. Most students join them and it's the only way to interact and plus these committees are very active and fun so yeah credit where it is due. The only spice of law school that you get to enjoy the most. while other colleges must be thinking, what's so exciting about it? well, in other N schools, even if you do not join many committees, you can still do good but very rarely a person not involved in committees has fared well in GLC. not saying committees contribute in any skill set or distinct personality but that's how new opportunities open up.

Placement- while I can only review my placecom till the time I am/was there. In our college, most students has secured their way to the job without any contribution of the placecom. this committee is mostly lethargic and incompetent. you can ask them for the number of 2019-2020-2021(lmao) batch placement report. they think they're sitting on the legacy of the GOATs and therefore, the recruiter will come to them and say please please get me students of the current batch at any costs. while you'll think there is a bit of exaggeration in this particular indicator but tbh, it's worse without it as well.
they hardly take any effort while I see the contemporary law school taking so much effort to find jobs on job portals and LinkedIn (One such mention is of AIL, Mohali who are so active and making an effort) and get their student placed. As a student, I know the situation is adverse in job markets but as long as you see your committee making efforts for you, you're content at the end of the day. but students who are in such a position of the committee might not come from a background where they've struggled for things and therefore, they don't have a knack for putting in extra efforts.

Fact for you to believe me
In GLC there is a good amount of students from other states and from out of Mumbai city and suburbs. but still, the committee went ahead and conducted physical interviews in the middle of the pandemic with no sense of empathy and understanding that there could be people who can't come to Mumbai solely for an interview due to these difficult times. there were very few virtual opportunities that we didn't hear of till now.

Absolutely fails in forging a relationship with a recruiter, you will see only 2-3 Tier one firm coming and taking only 1-2 student from a batch 280+320 (total batch size including 3 years and 5 years students) out of which only 70-80 would desire to sit for placement which speaks of the confidence of student that their placecom is good for nothing. Mumbai being the home for the corporates still you'll see not corporates taking the recruits from our college.

To be continued below in comment due to TOO large comment issue

I am inclined to agree with the OP in so far as he states that these conversations have deteriorated into rabble rousing non-sense. Even if one were inclined to ignore these conversations, the damage that these could do to young minds makes it difficult to not raise an objection in the general interest.

The cancerous portions of these conversations could be traced to three sources:

I. Salary: The most toxic of all, these conversations might warp a person's perspective into channeling all his efforts into being the best paid worker. The practice of law is much more than money. No conversation (as far as I could see) was about the joy of law, the adventures of litigation, the satisfaction in legal aid, or developing the quiet professionalism seen in doyens of the bar. The law firm crowd with their "Tiers" have made legal profession equipollent to Dante's inferno. Any argument that these conversations help to seek pay parity is far removed from reality.

II. NLU slug-fests: These need to be banned. They are not only worthless but is immensely prejudicial to the average joe from the corner street college. These conversations not only betray a disgusting superiority complex, but also are discourteous to the "others" most of the time. Most of these conversations are so detached from reality, one cannot help but wonder whether these are even written by practicing professionals. LI and the readers need to remember that it is the non-nlus which constitute the back bone of justice delivery system in India. These NLU slug fests poison the fraternity among lawyers.

III. Non-law threads: For a population who neither know the basics of virology nor are qualified to speak about it, threads such as whether Covid is a bio-weapon should never be allowed. Political threads should also not be allowed as they quickly devolve into an echo chamber.

The Good portions: Threads about work-life balance, assistance and guidance to juniors, professional discussions on various practice areas (I remember the unique tax practice thread with some fantastic answers), the difference in work cultures of north and south, etc. These are informed and much needed.

Lucknow being the hometown is great. It will help keep sane and make usual difficulties easier to manage.

Few points about practice in the courts (Don't know much about the District courts. People who ask this question are usually aiming at the HC. I would imagine its the same case here):

- Make what you think of it but I think the Criminal side practice is a lot more muddled than it is on the Civil side at the HC. Civil side practice has some great offices; great lawyers. I am aware of two three GLC, Nirma and NLU graduates working at these offices, which brings me to the second point.

- As is the case elsewhere, if you hold a good command of English and have a better grasp of Hindi then it is an ideal position. The Civil side practice has many average offices/lawyers; by just utilizing your grasp of the languages, you can make your presence felt during the hearings. Much of the working documents (instructions, reports, etc.) are received in kishtt hindi and it would help if you got yourself one of those books on administrative jargons (in Hindi).

- Many of the judges are good and you can create an impression on them as time passes by. J Jaspreet Singh is excellent on the civil side. DKU understands land revenue issues better than anyone in UP. What I am trying to highlight is that to enjoy a practice you require judges which can pierce to the issues fast. You'll get that in a few of the courts here.

- Pay: I have only an outsiders account of the litigation offices. Most good offices (Mr. Mathur for ex.) do not pay at the start (which is where having a home in the city helps assuage the pressures of the first few days). Pay, once it begins, is also low (I guess 10-15k? Not sure). But then there is lots of room at the top, by building up on your experience after joining any of the good offices, you can go independent.

Its a limited perspective from an outsider but I hope it helps you grasp things. Also, if you recognize as a woman, I would like to point out that the Lucknow HC is infested with only male lawyers. But that also means that lady lawyers can easily distinguish themselves in terms of their ability and competence. To take an example, the NHAI standing counsel Ms. Samidha is a very good at her work and the judges are always happy with her preparation. So that's one thing. Hope all these random recollections help you make up your mind. I would suggest that you intern under the good offices (Gaurav Mehrotra has a nice practice, lots of young people in his office) and get a sense of what it is like to work at the court and then take their advice. Lots of room at the top, in my perception!

One time when I fell really sick and couldn't go to work for about 12 days. Those 12 days were the most peaceful days I have had during my law firm days. No calls, no chasers, no anxiety attacks and lots of rest. After I went back to work I realised that work didn't stop because I was away on sick leave. It went on just fine without me. Made me wonder why my partner would make me work on every weekend, holiday and on my annual leaves. Was every deliverable really that urgent? No.

A couple of months went by. I was working on another deal with impossible deadlines. I started dreaming about how life was peaceful when I was sick for those 12 days. I was so exhausted that I started wishing for sickness just so that I could get uninterrupted rest. I started losing interest in life, in meeting friends, watching movies, listening to music or even going out with my better half. I only had negative thoughts. Money did not make me happy anymore. I had become quite miserable and sad. That's when I decided to leave my high paying Tier-1 law firm job and take a break. It was undoubtedly the best decision I took. After a few months, I joined a company as an in-house lawyer. The pay is slightly lesser but I am happier than ever.