Horrible. the placement committee is run by a veritable fossil and her enthusiastically incompetent lackeys who are severely out of touch with the industry and the demands of the market. Last I checked, the college charges somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20k for the privilege of sitting for placements (over and above the amount charged for training/placement as part of the annual fees). For the last 3ish years, less than a third of the students sitting for placements have gotten a job on campus.

Work drying up?

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

This is the official data shared by the admin – look at the disproportionate number of bunk beds for women's hostels, as opposed to men's hostels:

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

I had a quick question.

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.

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I fully agree with the above observations. I think as someone who began their career with boutiques and is sort of shifting towards a full-service law firms, I particularly do want to reiterate a few of the above points -

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

Why? Is it because you are one of those selfish Gen Z narcissists who wants to be lazy and get up at 11.30am claiming that to be an accommodation for a purported "disability" and make life even harder for people with actual disabilities? Just go to the office man, and let world events resolve themselves.

I was surprised by how relevant Economic Times Legal turned out to be for me as a corporate M&A lawyer. Absolute gem of an outlet and gives me exactly what I need for my job - commercial legal updates and not unnecessary stuff which crowds Bar and Bench, LiveLaw etc. such as divorce and matrimonial disputes, how much alimony blah blah blah

TMT is different from Legal Tech. If you're talking specifically about LegalAI companies, they would fall under the Legal Tech space. It's not necessary to know coding as a skill for legal tech roles but it would definitely be an added benefit. You can have different kind of Legal Tech Roles, some roles require some prior experience in law firms so that you have an idea about the end consumer. Being a TMT lawyer on the other hand deals with the legalities involved with respect to Tech, Media or Telecom.

Depends on what kind of organisation you tend to join:
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.

Knowing coding is not something a TMT lawyer needs more than any other type of corp lawyer – I'd recommend getting a hang of it regardless to make monotonous tasks easier, but a TMT lawyer's day to day work remains the same as any other corporate lawyer.

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.

Rarely read any journal cover to cover, of course. But here are the ones I dip into more or less extensively from time to time: Cambridge Law Journal (CLJ), Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (OJLS), Public Law, Industrial Law Journal, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, Law and Philosophy, International Journal of Constitutional Law (I•CON), Legal Theory, International and Comparative Law Quarterly (ICLQ), among others (not a practicing lawyer though).

I have been using it for about 4-5 years now. Definitely recommend. However, their repertoire keeps changing. When I had subscribed, they had The Hindu & The Indian Express. They dropped The Hindu some 4 years ago, followed by The Indian Express about 2-3 years ago.

Still good enough to read The Caravan, India Today, Economic Times & Times of India etc.

Sanjoy Ghose has gone ballistic on social media after the TMC lost the elections. I don’t know why he’s so upset. If the reason is professional, I’m sure there are other non-BJP state governments that will be very happy to brief him. If the reason is emotional, governments come and go. It happens. Part of life.

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.

Calling what has happened with the committee a hijacking by later batches into a propaganda outfit is an unfair assessment, given the diversity of guests that have come forth in recent years, and the line of questioning they were met with within the university - current students can very well attest to the same, be it for the former Justice Indu Malhotra or Dr S Muralidhar.

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.

I think you can consider getting a subscription to the app 'Magzter'. One subscription (about 3.5K a year) grants access to a number of newspapers and magazines including loads of business magazines and special interest magazines. Plus, you can read it on your phone/ iPad so if you don't enjoy the feel of a physical newspaper, it's really good.

Second link is non-paywall

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

https://www.legaleraonline.com/hires-and-moves/khaitan-co-expand-hyderabad-with-basava-rao-and-shabbeer-ahmed-as-partners-985437

Here you go

No harm in trying, but it is very very unlikely. I had a similar profile to you a few years ago (but higher grades and rank) and got rejected from oxbridge but accepted into all US Ivies I'd applied to. Look at the batch profile of Oxford, they make it public. There's not a single person there with a batch rank under 3 or 4. Cambridge is better, but they still prioritise academics over all else. You have better chances at the US, they assess applications more holistically. I know someone with the same grades as you who got into UPenn.

Sandeep Das joined them a year back and has set up a gun disputes team. From what I have heard he moved with his entire team and practice from AP and they are doing really well. They work with a whole host of international clients and foreign law firms and do top end work - lots of arbitrations, NCLT and white collar crimes work including court work. Pay is better than the market but one needs to be hard working and put in long hours!

Will he do his road shows online also?

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.

No you need not know coding to be in TMT. Having technical knowledge helps a lot in this sector as this area is the interface bw tech and law.

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

You will pay ₹6L in tuition + ₹2.75L plus in hostel fees every semester. And then sit your exams from home.

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.

Not really. In 4th year, you will realise how it is difficult to schedule callbacks in Feb and June since Feb is marked as mandatory internship by many firms for the incoming A0s and all colleges have a vacation in June. In contrast, other colleges that get exemptions can intern in any given month which helps scheduling callbacks easier. They can also afford to do 2 callbacks with a single firm. None of this is possible at NLS. These are some of the key reasons why NLS is lagging behind in terms of placements.

Here's what I've been running-

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.

1. In bombay where is likelihood of success greater for a first gen litigator - OS or AS.

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)

People won't overtly discriminate or judge you for taking a double drop. That being said, you may find some of it happening in the first year, so maybe just stay mum and don't tell them about it. After first year, you will have your grades and rank and people will find new ways to discriminate.

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.

This is why India's lawyers will fundamentally never be able to compete with their foreign counterparts. This insularity + mentality of hyperspecialisation. Look up this phrase that western law firms keep banging on about in their recruitment materials - 'commercial awareness'. That very much involves keeping up with financial news. You can't be a commercial lawyer if you don't understand the market, and the law firm's place within it as a business. Not that what you are saying is wrong in terms of the sources you've suggested, but it is so problematically incomplete.

If one person from any of these batches becomes a Rhodes Scholar + Oxford DPhil like him, according to Sudhir, the rest of you guys can go eat grass. Just manage your lives on this basis. If you can and want to, chase that path. If you can't and/or don't want to, work hard to chase your alternative dreams in your own way.

Joined a T1 two months ago in their Cap Marks team. Lot of work and the team’s pretty uptight and inflexible. Thing is I’d registered to take the CAIA exams before I joined them and it’s next week. I want to take that day off since I can’t work from home during my exam, and it’s pretty expensive. But my seniors are sure to yell at me if I ask for a day off it seems. What do I do?

Easily do some of the most cutting edge work in the industry. However getting in is extremely tough as they run one of the most stringent hiring processes. Once you are in, you are a part of some truly elite company. The Managing Partner is widely considered to be a Corporate Law Czar and is a trusted advisor to some of the most prominent names in the business world.

Finding accommodation in Delhi as a lawyer is honestly a pain. Between landlord hesitation in leasing to lawyers, high broker fees, and the general lack of context on who you’re dealing with, the process can get exhausting very quickly.

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So I am going to preface this by saying I do not know the character of the partner or his wife. I am not vouching for his character. But I do know the below.

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.

Honestly though, I have seen clients being very frustrated with the current bunch of lawyers, who hardly see Capital Markets as law based. But there are many wonderful people also who are worth their salt - rest if you have the right birth and surname, you are born leader of a firm.

Hello, NEED to know which TMT teams (Firm, City, Partner) are hiring, especially in Bangalore….but Mumbai Delhi works too

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

Situation must have turned dire. Still sugar coating as "suggestion". It doesn't matter if his suggestion is ignored, lampooned or baited politically. That's a separate circus.

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.

OP here, and honestly, I'm not sure how much I agree with this. I don't think exemptions for internships etc are feasible or the best. I do however understand the larger concern, and think it is in large part due to the batch expansion and the inability of students to add to their CVs via conferences, moots, negotiations (cross registration), essay-writing competitions, etc. due to the stringent attendance requirements and the unnecessary 'rigour' of the courses (handwritten assignments in 2026? really? surely there are better alternatives :/).

I have worked across them a couple of times, they are a small Delhi based no nonsense firm. I think they do only corporate, IP and media work. While they are small, their quality of work is quite good. The lead partners are very competent, and it has always been tough but pleasant negotiating with them. I would imagine the training that is possible there for an associate will be quite good.