JD is still a graduate degree. So you need to have done your undergraduate degree in something else already. For a JD, it’s 1 Cr/ per investment in any of the top law schools, then deal with VISA lottery for a work permit. Which also depends on how the hiring market is (typically terrible for international students)

It’s a difficult path to decide to take.

US visa situation is too bad. For MBAs, since their degree is STEM, they get 3 years of OPT, hence 3 chances of applying for H1B. Also- MBA equip you with skills that are geographically full transferable.

Plus- even if you don’t end up getting H1B post a top US MBA, most likely your company would be willing to transfer you to Canada/UK/Europe/Middle East. Whereas, for JD, skills are not as transferable geographically.

An ex-T1 employee here. I worked in a T1 firm, with a decent team, in a relatively non-toxic office, however I was not able to manage the increasing workload and my recurring health problems. After working for the just the first few months, I became severely ill, and my worsening health started affecting my mental health as well. It reached a point where I was not able to work or even for that matter live a normal life anymore. I spoke with my parents and they were generous enough to support me at this point, both morally and financially. I decided to resign and move back to my home town. Now I work in a chamber here, I stay with my family. Yes, I get paid less, and you don't have the fancy AC office and tier 1 lifestyle, but guess what, I have never been happier. I love my current job, I make enough money for myself, and I get to spend time with my family. My health improved significantly, and now I feel good. I appear regularly in court and I am doing well at work. I am confident that in a few years I can become independent. Now, I am not saying all litigating chambers are like this, or that everyone enjoys litigation. I have seen miserable people here as well. I have also seen very satisfied and happy people in law firms. The bottom line as far as I have understood is, find what suits you and pursue it. There is no one correct answer. I went to an NLU and I was sort of indoctrinated into this mindset that somehow working in a tier-1 law firm is the end all and be all of your life, trust me it is not. So please to everyone reading prioritise your mental and physical health. Because at the end of the day, to all law firms and teams you work with, you are replaceable but to your family and loved ones you are not.

According to these people, Sudhir is the human personification of the fiend from the pit! He schemes, he is "economical with the truth" (the words of Sir Robert Armstrong (as he then was), not the Sudhir critics - they don't have the brains or the sophistication levels to use such phrases), he is a bully. And yet... when they try to convince others about his fiendishness, all we see is a good (but very strict) teacher.

To all the junior associates here, what do you expect a partner to do when a client demands draft to be turned around overnight?

Partner can say no but then there is risk of client to engage another law firm for next assignment. Law firm loses business which impacts profitability and as a result less increment/bonus. Will junior associates be fine with that?

Other option is to hire 3 lawyers instead of 1 and divide the workload. This will also mean salary being 1/3rd of what currently the 1 lawyer earns. Again, will junior associates be fine with that?

I can tell the opposite of this. I moved as an A2 from SCAM and was getting 24L everything included. At JSA, I was making 27/28L after taking into account the bill share.

Do note that this was some time back. I was also lucky to be in a high billing team, I've heard people from other teams making much less so only move if it's a high billing team like M&A, B&F or Cap Marks

Not sure what JSA is doing. They are just randomly hiring and increasing their strength. Some hires of course are good and will pay off, but whether all hires will be profitable or not is the question. Hence it may affect the overall profitability of the firm and in any case JSA has not been super profitable off late.

Disagree that their deals are at T1 levels. They do some high value deals, but can’t be generalised. It’s a different aspect that the T1s have started doing lower ticket and VC deals also, except for AZB and Trilegal perhaps. Having said that, yes…NL guys have been gradually expanding team, and pay is not bad. So, I assume they have enough work.

As someone who regularly write LORs for students, I agree with most of this, other than that a personal email address is not deemed acceptable by the portals or universities. A student of mine had once submitted my personal email address by mistake and the university had sent the portal link and access to that email only. It is possible that it had been done because they already had my profile on their record as a regular referee, but cannot say for sure.

Not that I know. Srijoni has taken some sort of fellowship. The other two I am not sure about, but certainly not back to JGLS. Prabhash is the only person I know who have returned to JGLS, but he had to move away earlier only because his SAU lien did not get renewed. Otherwise, people who leave JGLS tend to stay away for good, based on my limited knowledge.

Exactly. If he has learnt from his own mistakes, then so can others. Without him having to humiliate them in the process. That's what empathy is all about. "Not because he was lazy but because he did not prioritise properly." - That's exactly the kind of reason several students also don't manage to honour deadlines. A good teacher tries to understand the reasons why a student is not doing things in time. The laziness isn't to be encouraged, nor should genuine reasons or mistakes be penalised. Since you are getting ad hominem about me, should I tell you in turn that you are being paid by Sudhir to defend him?

All partners have decent matters. DM has good ones but I can't say anything about the quality of work or WLB. The teams are generally small barring a few. It actually drives them to the point of insanity at times and a sheer lack of guidance from the partners. Associates in my team left around 10 everyday, that was the norm. I think it applies across all teams. Good matters do take a lot of time for a reason, it is tough to navigate around it.

https://www.politico.eu/article/italy-giorgia-meloni-legalizing-chemical-castration-rapists-pedophiles-sex-offenders/

This is urgently needed after the RG Kar hospital incident in India as well.

BIG NO ! Coming from someone who has worked with her. Very full of herself and set in her ways of working. Not the face you would want to see early morning. Ill mannered and tempered.

As a lawyer she knows what she is doing and is an equity for the same reason (though that should NOT be just the criteria for becoming a senior partner). No amount of knowledge, experience and money is justified IMO for one to work with her team. People who have worked with her and mentored under her have similar temperaments.

If you are dead inside, you'll love the team. Not otherwise.

BIG NO ! Coming from someone who has worked with her. Very full of herself and set in her ways of working. Not the face you would want to see early morning. Ill mannered and tempered.

As a lawyer she knows what she is doing and is an equity for the same reason (though that should NOT be just the criteria for becoming a senior partner). No amount of knowledge, experience and money is justified IMO for one to work with her team. People who have worked with her and mentored under her have similar temperaments.

If you are dead inside, you'll love the team. Not otherwise.

Typical scenes in tier 1 law firms- lawyers from other cities come to tier 1 law with high hopes leaving their ageing parents alone. These lawyers live alone or with similar other lawyers on rent. They pay very high rent but are in office till 3 am or 4 am almost everyday. They don’t save any money and also ruin their health. When they see other lawyers from different backgrounds wanting to go home on time to spend time with their families or spouses, they call these other lawyers lazy or not very ambitious or not hard working. The whole law firm culture is meant for people who don’t have a life or family and don’t mind risking their health for very little money.

I mean this kind of RC would mean you got some disapproval in a Sudhir class. Man is holding himself accountable you idiot. That’s what telling that story is- in that story he even says he apologised to the students. He’s chastising himself about something that happened years ago. Not because he was lazy but because he did not prioritise properly. Learn from his example and be humble and own your own mistakes instead of harping on others.

Cool

As language matter more than the issues congratulations you won

Hopefully there would be day you will be able to see this. To what I understand you must be someone from dispute team from law chambers. Not someone from t-1 working in PE VC, M&A or capital markets team. Otherwise you would have experience the same.

I moved from JSA to another T1 last year. Have been thinking about just how much more JSA pays compared to the rest of these places. I know it isn't the same for all teams but I was in a particularly high billing team and man, it's just significant money on the table that the rest of these places just don't give.

Don't miss the brutal nature of the team though. But the money was very, very good in some months. I wonder if there will come a day other places will also do a similar bill share model.

Absolutely well deserving.. JSA's not just picked a strong bunch of lawyers here but also some truly remarkable people.

They'll be dearly missed at Induslaw.. they were true leaders & ambassadors of the firm not just in their locations or practices but nationally across all offices & across all hierarchies.

Sour grapes ha?

His team is the most profitable team & everyone in the firm knows it. Low billers don't make it to equity dear.. especially not simultaneously at 2 firms :D

Go read other threads on LI about him & you will know the gem that he is & what he's built at Indus in 7 yrs with absolutely nil support. They've made rain in a desert.

Relative to the number of fee earners they hire each year and their existing retainer strength, I’d say that S&R fires the most. Until Gogia’s departure, I genuinely believed these firings were aimed at creating a Spartan army of India’s brightest, most talented, and best-paid attorneys. And whats with thier litigation team? How many blood baths would it take?

Responding to all the questions, assuming they are genuinely asked in good faith:

1. Law school professors who taught a student (and occasionally a work supervisor, e.g., law firm partner, if they've worked a while after law school) write these types of letters.

2. The application portals of the universities ask for the nomination (by the student) of anywhere between zero (King's College London) to one (UCL, QMUL, e.g.) to three (Oxford and Cambridge) to up to five (Harvard) referees. The form asks for the official, institution-associated, email ID of the referee(s) (so only an @nls.ac.in kind of ID would be acceptable, not any random ID like gmail). Some universities (e.g., UCL) ask for referee phone numbers as well, for further verification. Yet others (LSE being a prominent example, which asks for a compulsory two references) ask why a particular referee has been nominated, with LSE specifically giving options on their form such as "availability", "institutional policy" etc (i.e., they think that some institutions, for certain reasons, may require certain professor(s) who taught a student something specific or who were in a specific position of responsibility for a student (e.g., academic advisor) to write a reference).

3. Once the student's application is submitted (or in some cases, once the student has inputted the reference details into a form), the referee gets an automated email from the concerned university's system, giving them a secure link to upload a recommendation letter to, and a deadline of when to upload it by. The student doesn't get this link. The universities usually ask also that the reference be written on institutional letterhead. Often, these systems have the option for a popup to show up at the student's end if the referee hasn't submitted within a certain time, for the student to either change the referee they are using, or re-input the referee details, so the request of a reference upload email with the secure link gets resent.

4. The above is done to ensure that (a) the referee isn't a fraud; and (b) the student has no idea what has been written.

Sir, being in SAM for years now, I can tell you - that your progression will depend on a number of things including how much your team meets the target, how much your boss decides to share a piece of the pie and whether you (and your work) are liked by your team and partner.

I can assure you that like every other firm, at each level there can be a difference in payment. Like a top performing A1 is getting 23.5 whereas a low performing A1 is also getting 21.

Disclaimer - Cap marks rant.

Dunno much about other practices, but cap marks teams, some more than others, glorify overwork with motivating filing messages/posts, when you haven't even been able to sleep, bathe and function normally. Ofc they say take the day off, but the partner/senior with his next deal filing is already riling around you. All things seem to be working against the practice - it is overregulated, clients are pushy and completely unreasonable (but again they don't know how our partners run an understaffed ship so don't blame them completely), spineless partners pretending to have their shit in place and taking in more work than they can handle all the while their team has no management and structure, and next to nil PAs and SAs. And some of them can't even be bothered to read emails and delegate work properly. Maybe it's just my team though.

Calm down! They used an exploding telephone, if I remember rightly (perhaps I am thinking of the movie about this and may have my facts wrong, but I think not), in the case of one of the Black September terrorists (or attack planners) who killed the Israeli athletes in the 1972 olympics. They also used poison in the toothpaste of Wadi Hadad of (I think) the PLO to kill him (every time he brushed his teeth, bit of the poison got inside his system) (see Ronen Bergman's book, 'Rise and Kill First' *).

Were all telephones and toothpaste tubes of the world implanted with bombs and slow-acting poisons from then onwards?

The activists against both these types of prejudice are right: #NoJewsNoNews, #NoMuslimsNoNews.

*Ronen Bergman, 'Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations' (2018) can be purchased at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rise-Kill-First-Targeted-Assassinations/dp/1400069718

I am really concerned about the raise.

My family has a loan. I don't like to share more details about me.

What's the payment scale I can expect as I grow up the ladder.

How much will I get paid at A1, A2, A3, SA1 & SA2 levels?

Please help me so I'd compute accordingly. If it isn't as per general standard, I might have to switch.

He should join litigation and pick up cases for ex servicemen. I know plenty of JAG & other officers who retired & joined DC, HC & SC. They usually take up cases related to defence personnel & family. Majority of the army personnel live in a bubble, so certain civil/public services don't work smoothly and they end up getting into legal tussle. Moreover, his experience in the army will help get closer to the clients and understand them better. Whether people accept it or not, civilians will never understand the fauji mentality. That's where retired JAG or lawyers who served in the army step in to help. He could choose his specialisation when he get's into law. It could be civil, criminal or even tax. Make sure he takes admission in DU, as it's LLB is good for litigation, plus will give him plenty of time to intern in the nearby courts. Even if he practices in his hometown later on, the expert of Delhi courts is the best. In those three years, he'll easily learn DC to SC workings. All the best.

Sadly, no one. People don't understand that even though Upendra Baxi, BS Chimni, Bharat Desai, MP Singh etc are legends in their own right, it took them decades to establish a legacy. Moreover these are homegrown academicians, which makes it even more special. Today majority of good academics do their UG, PG, PhD, post docs abroad, and even though they have good pedigree aboard, they sometimes lose touch with the Indian grassroots. Most of them also don't return back home. In the current scenario the best cited professors are abroad, and even the ones in India are not cited heavily abroad. There's no actual indian representation, no Indian voice, it's just the colonial patchwork over Indians abroad.