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Senior research fellow would be 1.25 lakhs around im guessing.
Well timed
This semester I had a mandatory graded moot and I used SCC Online, AIR and their likes for the first time, and the sheer inefficiency boggled me. This clearly wasn't going to work in the long term, I have 6 semesters left, which comes to around 36 assignments, and I need better. So I started with API reverse engineering. Not a huge problem for me, I have done this in the past, I have worked with documented trading APIs and I have been messing with websites for 3 years now, so I had a very decent working knowledge, knew how stuff works. It isn't particularly difficult either, all you need is a sense of architecture and curiosity; I'm a law student who came from a commerce background with a fascination for computers, so it's not difficult. I kept building on top of that SCC Online MCP, and now the problem is that there's so much to download and index that it is becoming difficult. Even setting up a cron job at this scale is proving to be difficult.
I am actively trying to make the offline corpus bigger, I aim to include as many reports as possible, Gazettes, Parliamentary Debates, laws that were drafted but never passed, articles from public journals in my DB. Right now it just has laws and a few hundred important and major reports. The problem is the majority of the stuff is not organised, so downloading, indexing and organising is a huge task. I hit a wall multiple times and still hit one with every new source, but it is well worth it. I use this solely for assignments, as I was never interested in moots and research papers, so I am not hurrying like my career depends on it.
That said, I am trying to fix all the errors and make the DB public, access to structured data shouldn't be a bottleneck for anyone. I cannot make the MCPs public for obvious reasons. It took me about 2 weeks with a lot of work, around half a dozen all-nighters and once I worked 8 hours straight to put things in perspective, and that's with my background; the part that took time was trying to come up with ways to improve it. From scratch with no background, 2 to 4 hours a week, it should take anyone willing 5 to 6 months. It is a little difficult to make and work with, but it is a complete game-changer for anyone willing to put in the work. Any small law firm or solo lawyer can and should be able to adopt this as well once it is more stable and bigger.
I'm also working on a model interconnect so ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Kimi and Deepseek can debate each other and find flaws in the output. This would strengthen the reasoning capability significantly, and the best part is it would still be cheap af, though it is proving more difficult than I thought.
This is also better than commercial tools because it is not bound by a lot of the institutional stuff they are bound by, liability hedging, locked-in models, fixed pipelines. They also cannot just reverse-engineer APIs, download stuff off the internet and call it a day, and they have to build something sustainable as a business. Since you're paying for the subscription of AI services directly, you get far better value, as the API itself is much costlier, and after the overhead of the company you're either paying very high prices or paying for it in the quality.
The best part about this entire system is that you're always in control of everything, the reasoning capacity, data, model type, costs, the offline corpus, how you want the output to look like. The entire thing is practice-agnostic, you can fetch data, make a database and start it. Plus the custom instructions in CLI are followed much more thoroughly than they are in the web. It is cheap as well, especially if you use opencode go.
If anyone wants to build something like this and needs technical help, feel free to reach out at LIunofficialtechhelp.contact@proton.me. Do not ask me for the MCPs, I won't be sharing them for obvious reasons, and don't try to buy them either, you'll be wasting your time. I can guide you through building your own, but sharing mine crosses a line I'm not willing to cross. I'll be lurking on the thread for a few days as well if anyone has doubts.
The core dispute: after tendering notice, the firm unilaterally curtailed the contractual 30-day notice period by cutting the last working day short — conveniently avoiding the obligation to pay fee in lieu of notice. The timing is hard to miss: the truncation neatly sidestepped a bonus payment that would have triggered at month-end under the retainership terms.
The notice goes further — raising claims for a promised increment with arrears effective November 2025, which the firm strung along with vague, non-committal responses for months. When pushed, the partners apparently told the associate to “remind them in March” — and then quietly ensured there was no March to remind them in.
The firm’s reply cited performance concerns — without a single particular to back them up. Convenient, given that during the entire period the associate was being billed out to clients and appreciated internally.
The notice also flags professional misconduct by the partners and an inappropriate work environment — details the associate says they’re happy to share with moderators directly.
Budget cuts?
Mass layoffs?
Recruitment freeze?
How bad will it be?
Of course, nepo kids will remain unscathed but my question is about regular people.
https://www.ndtvprofit.com/markets/uday-kotak-says-prepare-for-the-worst-urges-india-to-brace-for-big-shock-from-us-iran-conflict-11482577
Room inventory list
The following table indicates the number of rooms of each category available for Men and Women residents
Inventory
2 Bed
3 bed (cubicle)
3 bed (Non bunk)
3 bed (Bunk)
Total Beds
Men’s Residences
75
66
39
18
519
Women’s Residences
40
21
5
93
437
Anyone here who spent years in BigLaw and then went independent? How did it go? Are you still independent? Do you regret it? What was more rewarding for you? How did you manage to build clients?
Ok maybe it wasn’t a quick question rather few but you get the drift. Your kind comments will help few souls.
1) PAY - It is definitely less than the average corporate pay. In fact, your peers in corp will always earn more, even if you are breaking into Tier 1 [at least I believe so; I could have negotiated my own deal poorly lol]. At 4 PQE, a lot of my friends have been struggling to crack 1L a month (in hand), while corp/lit people seem to be getting it quicker.
2) OVER-SPECIALIZATION - So Boutiques largely run the game in terms of prosecution (at least in Delhi), and also (owing to the SME business they take up as opposed to big ticket clients that a Tier 1 looks for) do see a lot of highly tricky cases. But they also overly-compartmentalize. In fact, prosecution itself is broken down into: contention and non-contentious. I have spent time at firms where I literally just did oppositions or prosecutions or C&Ds. In full-service, there are two firms (in my mind) which are attempting to also take on the prosecution game - KCO and FM. The name of the game with these firms is volume, even if it comes at the cost of lower prices. Result: the usually under-staffed associate team takes the brunt. But, owing to being full-service, they often get work outside of prosecution/litigation/core IP as well (such as metrology advisory, even a little bit of data privacy compliance). Personally, I believe I should have pursued a more general role than IP prosecution, as it is highly specific.
3) Lack of feedback: If you venture into IP prosecution. I have two specific gripes I want you to know: 1) In 2026, I believe a substantial number of attorneys who have made it to the top, came-up at a time where IP laws were a little too lax. I thus find my faith waning a lot in such partners (usually people who have only done prosecution and are now partners in prosecution teams). I actually kind of blame allowing trade mark agents into prosecution. It's just a shitty mix where the attorneys in this field feel like more sophisticated TM agents without the rigour of law. E.g. - It's an entire industry who functioned on putting a Stamp Paper of INR 100 for allllll POAs without any of them even once consulting the Stamp Duty Act, ever - An.Entire.Industry. 2) TM Registry has a loooong waiting period. You can initiate an opposition and then have to wait like 6 years for an answer to come your way on merits, with no interim hearings, no update, nothing. Thus, the problem? You have a partner you can't entirely trust and a system which is not quick enough for you to truly see if your arguments bear any merit in the actual game. In some existential sense, I believe that not a growth has happened for me owing to that. I do read a lot and constantly attempt to get better sectoral knowledge and hope to upskill myself. I have also had good partners, so touch wood, I don't feel lost. But this feeling is there.
P.S - I must admit, I am writing this at a time of my life where I am frankly a little embittered with IP Prosecution and am actively moving away from it to a more transactional IP space. I know people who are having a lot of fun in this space too. No work is bad work in law if you're willing to think your way through it like a lawyer - meticulous and forensic. So don't take this to mean IP prosecution is a dead route.
P.S.S - My career (as on date) has been fully Delhi. It is possible other cities have better experiences. But I largely Delhi to be ahead in IP.
P.S.S - About the Feedback Loop. I must also admit, the TM Registry is becoming more vigilant, more stringent, and better. Thus, in 3 years time this comment might have been ancient and unusable to fingers crossed
Is the reported a dodgy fellow?
1. Purely research and policy - Freshers get 40-50k. Career trajectory may take you till 90k and all. Senior level positions may be around 1.3 to 1.5L.
2. Lobby organisations - Won't name them - but organisations which basically tend to publish research which favours a particular lobby of industrialists / sector players / strongmen - 10k to 20k higher. (Zero ethics though)
3. Political Consultancies cum Policy Organisations - Either from Right or Left spectrum - Depending on where you are coming from + your last CTC, they are known to pay the highest.
Hope this helps. Though the career growth plateau is very real in policy, until and unless you are smart enough to make it into the big corporates with their own policy departments.
Instead of researching MCA notifications, you look up TRAI white papers. Any team/partner placing an emphasis on coding is largely doing it for optics, since no firm is using or deploying any internally developed tools in any case.
Still good enough to read The Caravan, India Today, Economic Times & Times of India etc.
People shouldn’t take politics so seriously and it’s not a good look for a senior advocate to be ranting on Twitter non-stop. I hope he’s okay.
However, one issue that has persisted, as rightly pointed out by Anirudh in his tweet, is the very same culture of loud-mouthed left-oriented students trying to push down any ideology they don't agree with, which has not only persisted but has gotten entrenched in the GB as a whole. The issue lies with the overall culture that is being propogated within the university and that needs to be countered with voices that arent necessarily RW but rather simply more open minded and tolerant.
Personally, I've found the JNLUD to be interesting. I read it regularly though not fully. There's indconlawphil, but that's not really it.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2026/05/11/indias-pricey-private-universities-want-to-take-on-the-ivy-league
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/indias-pricey-private-universities-want-take-ivy-league-w4sdc
Here you go
Will he stop his multi nation trips?
Will his party folks stop moving in 100 car cavalcades when they go to their constituencies?
Will those big families close to him stop using 20 cars in their cavalcade?
Hell no. Hypocrisy rules.
All the advisories for the janta.
As far as skills - like any other area - have good research skills, know the latest updates in the area for examples how IT Rules have been periodically amended, the PROG Rules etc etc.
TMT is not a hype that will die lol, it's a growing sector.
You can hear more from an experienced partner in this podcast: https://youtu.be/i8nuVoesCJ8?si=Y3HcKNylsNFsH3yI
Some guidance please from skilled and experienced ass kissers.
Yes, Jindal Global Law School has moved to permanent online exams. The residential campus you're paying lakhs for? Optional. The academic rigour you're paying for? Gone.
Students haven't attended a single class. AI is writing their submissions. And everyone is cheating in exams: openly, knowingly, and without consequence.
The market has noticed. A partner at ▮▮▮ has already said they will no longer hire from Jindal because of the online exam policy.
This is a structural collapse of one of India's most expensive law schools.
Do your research before you pay. The Jindal that built its reputation is not the Jindal that exists today.
Thinking about career in policy but unsure there’s growth?
It might be a bit too technical for some readers but some highly techy lawyers might be having luck with similar approaches?
I reverse-engineered the APIs of SCC Online, Westlaw Classic, and Westlaw Asia, and made MCPs out of them. You need a subscription, as it's based on cookie-based authentication replay, but it works. You're kind of violating ToS, so don't abuse it, or else those guys will abuse you, and you don't want that. Don't try to scrape any of the closed DBs either. Thomson Reuters went rabid when ROSS Intelligence tried to pull it off; they had VC backing and still got crushed. You don't stand a chance. The MCP is also significantly faster than the actual SCC Online website; search and fetch take a fraction of the time, just to give you a sense of how well it performs. I use Playwright instances for mass-scale downloading of data and cookie capture. The Playwright instance has a keep-alive function; it simply keeps visiting pages every few minutes, and once a cookie is captured it stays valid for a good amount of time. Make sure to enforce proper rate limits, or you'll nuke your personal or institutional subscription.
You can do the same with AIR Online and The Hindu. I tested AIR Online with curl and direct API requests and it worked, but I didn't find much value in it, so I didn't bother adding it. I didn't try The Hindu, but the console does reveal an API key, so it should be theoretically possible. Added an Indian Kanoon MCP using their official API. Plus, there's a very popular library whose MCP you can use by donating to them, so it fetches books as well.
For the offline corpus, I downloaded every piece of legislation and report I could find, then rented some GPUs from E2E Networks (they're India-based and the rates are reasonable; note that you'll need to complete KYC on E2E before you can spin up compute). Use the PyTorch environment. It's the cleanest base to build the OCR pipeline on. Ran OCR first with Tesseract, which is very fast, and then for the files that had bad recognition I used Chandra LLM OCR, though its speed varies a lot (pro tip: make sure you're using vLLM and not HF). An L4 is sufficient for Tesseract, but for Chandra you'll want an A100. Don't waste time trying to run Chandra or Surya OCR on E2E's L4 instances; they have serious driver issues.
Structured everything into an FTS5 SQLite DB (FTS5 because it gives you better search capabilities), made an MCP out of it, and connected all of them to Claude Code CLI and opencode. There's a hierarchy in how the systems are queried: one is checked first, and if that doesn't satisfy the query, the next one is hit, and so on. The best part of this setup is that the cases are saved in .txt format, so the AI can actually read them, unlike what these sites do by serving non-machine-readable PDFs.
Modern frontier models can either handle 60-70 agents at once or, failing that, give you a 1-million-token context window. For instance, Kimi K2.6 can launch up to 300 agents but caps at a 256k token window, whereas Deepseek v4 Pro offers the full 1M context and can also launch multiple sub-parallel agents, just not as many as Kimi. Either way, you can research books, cases, and reports all at once with zero issues. That said, having 1M context doesn't mean you should fill it up; retrieval quality degrades as the window fills, so treat it as headroom, not a target. Also, don't try any parallel agent tomfoolery with Claude; you'll burn through your limit in under three minutes. Once the cases and material are saved, one agent is deployed per file, each saving its output in a separate folder in Markdown format, and finally one agent synthesizes everything. Opus 4.7 is the best pick for the final synthesis: it's the smartest model out there, and it'll consume very few tokens because the cheaper agents will have already chewed everything down and added the digestive aids. A final agent then checks the synthesis. The possibility of errors slipping through is low but real, which is exactly why humans still exist in the loop. Use Obsidian for reading the Markdown output, and make sure the Markdown is formatted properly so it converts cleanly to .docx via Pandoc.
On tooling, I suggest using opencode CLI, as you get access to opencode go, which is quite cheap. Claude Code eats tokens like anything; to do anything meaningful you'll need the $100/12000~ Max 5x plan, but ₹2000 pro plan will work if used cautiously. Codex CLI is also quite good with ChatGPT Plus. The usage limits are pretty generous even after they constrained them, especially compared to Claude. This workflow works best with CLI tools, not the apps of these platforms; I haven't tried the apps much, as it's just easier to work with these in the CLI. Also, adjust the reasoning capacity of the models based on the complexity of the work. Running Opus 4.7 on max reasoning will burn through your quota in minutes. Make sure you're using a custom directory and have custom instructions, such as telling the model to rely only on the supplied material, produce a review, and give the exact source.
A round of research can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on how many issues crop up, since the whole thing is still held together by duct tape, hopes, and wishes; that said, most issues resolve themselves in minutes. As for build time, I had a working knowledge of APIs and system architecture, which sped things up manifold. AI in the CLI also helps a lot with the build itself: even if you just hand it a HAR file, it'll reconstruct the API payloads for you. Took some doing, but scarce material and slogging through archaic portals stopped being the bottleneck.
2. How mutually exclusive are OS and AS. is it possible for somebody working with an AS senior to get OS work or vice versa.
3. Does an OS side adv have a better chance of expanding into criminal or AS matters as opposed to criminal/AS adv trying to expand into OS.
4. Who to contact for a position at chambers of OS seniors (do clerks/juniors have a say?) (entry barrier would be high because the association with the senior does not really end - is this true)
Also, while the college brand matters quite a bit, I don't think you should spend years after years behind it. It's an exam. You ace it-good. You don't- accept that it's not for you and move on. You have to work hard, if not for the exam then in college, and someway or the other, you will be awarded if you do. Just don't spend too much time chasing something, which could be the time you spend bettering yourself as a professional.
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This college does not live to other T1(s) but also is better than T2(s).
“ specialists” LMAOOOOO, specialists in running a society badly
One of my friends has an internship lined up for July 2026.
Ok. I know the reporter who has made this report in the Mumbai Mirror.
Which caused all this furore. He was previously with Mid Day.
One needs to only look at his previous articles, especially the one about the American Professor losing money. ▮▮. All I am saying is, if it was a ▮▮▮ ▮▮▮ reporter, I would have not had an issue.
Best of luck!
Do not give in to self harming thoughts. Put in the grind, worth it.
Which partners in Trilegal Bengaluru are hiring? Have heard Jaideep Reddy gave a PPO to someone from NUJS recently can someone confirm please. Also Nikhil’s team took an assosciate ig
What about NDA, now that only Kamath is left, do they even have a practice to hire..
What about partners from khaitan who do tech with gen corp work like Sanjay khan Nagraj (do they give direct PPOs)
And who from SAM?? But have heard SAM/CAM only give 2 week internships if you go by reference?
Do any other Tier 1s have active practices in blr that hire, will they still consider me or is hiring for BO’27 done? I’ve heard a lot of Data privacy work is coming in so juniors are needed
The reality is that we are oil and gas dependant. The Gulf sources were nearest and everything there has gone for a toss. Even if the war ends, the pumping and loading capacities are badly eroded and will come back online after some more years. Till then it will be a scramble from sources much further away. And no one cares about how refining is done. We don't just pump oil drawn from the wells into the vehicles. And oil isn't just vehicles.
Be that as it may, India will do well to push hard on electrification. Why make domestic cooking gas dependant. Ensure better, stable and always available electricity. And bring mission speed to thorium fueled nuclear energy.
When the origins of these endowments among others are deeply suspect and the subsequent history then you get this.
If you want to run them down, there is plenty ammo. Maybe there is a smoking gun here too. If yes, don't wait for a mewing SJA. Get the numbers, organise the facts and secure due direction from the new govt to undertake a proper forensic audit of NUJS finances including this one.
Just begin with the Justice PN Sinha Inquiry report. Follow the crumbs.
Will the well-qualified partners they poached from other firms leave?
Will the firm merge into KCO?
Will Amit Shah order the ED to resume the investigations into Abhishek Banerjee and Sanjay Basu?
OR…
Will it be business as usual?
Will the BJP govt retain AQUILAW?
Will Abhishek Banerjee patch up with the BJP?
Because one X factor is that Sanjay Basu has bought Ei Samay newspaper.
W.r.t. WCC, I have not directly worked/interned with or seen these teams up close and personal but from what I've caught on from classmates/colleagues, most teams actually don't do proper WCC as much as they do mainly compliance work. As you've rightly pointed out, core criminal practice cannot be equated to WCC teams as the myriad procedures/courts/work remains unknowable to a WCC Associate. However, good WCC teams do seem to give you weighty matters in PMLA/SARFAESI for example so that's that.