This recollection takes me back to 2012—not as gossip, but as a case study in how power actually behaves when tested.

A celebrity law firm from Okhla—still very much one—publicly committed to meritocracy and zero tolerance for incompetence, filed two or three affidavits before the Erstwhile Company Law Board that were improperly notarised and bore false signatures. This was not a trivial defect. It went to the basic integrity of representations made to a judicial body.

The response that followed was revealing.

The notaries involved were prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Their names were recorded. Their professional lives ended. The system demonstrated that it could act decisively—provided the targets were suitably peripheral.

Within this firm, accountability became more selective. The Principal Associate responsible—an NLS graduate, insulated by privilege—was quietly removed. His name appeared in the order, but misspelt. A minor clerical error, one might say. Yet a curiously convenient one: sufficient to gesture at responsibility, insufficient to anchor it. Responsibility was present in theory and absent in practice.

The junior associate—a NALSAR graduate—was treated differently. His name was spelled correctly. It was fixed in the record. When blame needed a home, and it found one!

More than a decade later, the outcome speaks for itself. The misspelt Principal Associate has not merely survived; he has prospered—occupying media space, dispensing opinions, and being routinely projected on this very website as senior-advocate material. The past has not followed him. It has been quietly edited out.

The Indian legal system does not lack standards; it lacks equal application of them. It does not deny failure; it reallocates its consequences. Discipline flows downward. Rehabilitation flows upward. And meritocracy survives—not as a fact, but as a comforting story maintained by omission, discretion, and selective memory.

Litigation practice without the active patronage of a senior is a fool’s sport. The Bar pretends otherwise, much as it pretends that merit alone determines who is heard, who is indulged, and who is dismissed. It does not. If judges do not recognise you as a “somebody,” then—especially in matters where stakes are high and decisions are quietly pre-cooked—you will be brushed aside with procedural politeness and substantive indifference.

Yes, your right of audience is guaranteed by your advocate’s licence. What is not guaranteed is the manner in which that right is received. Courtesy, patience, indulgence, and judicial elasticity are rationed commodities. They are dispensed not by law, but by lineage, reputation, and proximity to power.

This reality was made painfully clear to me some fifteen years ago. A now-retired celebrity judge—then a leading, second-generation senior advocate—was before a Supreme Court judge who had little appetite to grant relief. When signalled to wrap up, the senior did the unthinkable: he simply refused. He announced, without apology, that he would continue arguing. No junior could have survived such insubordination. But pedigree alters physics. The judge yielded, the arguments continued, and a conveniently favourable order followed.

The episode left behind an unavoidable question: would that latitude ever have been extended to me? Or to any lawyer without inherited authority, institutional insulation, or myth already built into their name? The answer, of course, is no. There is no level playing field. There never was.

At the Supreme Court, greatness is less often earned than conferred. Privilege is not an incidental advantage—it is the entry ticket. Without it, the honest options are bleak but clear: clear the AoR exam, attach yourself to a senior, remain useful, remain loyal, and survive on intermittent professional alms. Competence may buy you more work; it will not buy you power.

The system rewards obedience dressed up as apprenticeship, dependence masquerading as mentorship, and hierarchy repackaged as tradition. Those who pretend otherwise are either beneficiaries of the arrangement—or its most devoted apologists.

The noise you make has much to do with “not having a seat at the dinner table.” “You must learn to treat duffers and dalcops with contempt and condescension.” These are some of the barbs you’ll encounter when you call out the shit show that is the Supreme Court Bar—or the Delhi Bar more generally.

Here’s a post from a few weeks ago that illustrates this rather well:

The Supreme Court Bar Deserves Better Than This Manufactured, Closed-Door Ecosystem

https://www.legallyindia.com/convos/topic/462791-the-supreme-court-bar-deserves-better-than-this-manufactured-closed-door-ecosystem#comment-462791

Here are my two cents: if you must live in this country and work in an environment with even a semblance of meritocracy and professionalism, practise corporate law—at a JSA- or Trilegal-like firm, at the very least. Your options in India will no doubt be limited and far from perfect. Make no mistake: even in firms like these, there are highly questionable individuals occupying partnership positions, drawing work through connections that exist largely because they are the sons and daughters of judges, senior lawyers, senior bureaucrats, corporates, and politicians—especially on the disputes side. A cursory Google search will reveal this pattern in most cases. The exceptions merely prove the rule. One such individual was reportedly exposed on Legally India for investing, through himself and his immediate family, in election bonds—the sums involved far outstripping the pay of a so-called “salaried partner.” There is a great deal of muck under the hood even in corporate law.

If you don’t come from privilege, yet believe you deserve clean air and a fair shot at success through honest hard work—quit India.

You only need to read the judgments emanating from India over the last 20 years on something as basic as arbitration law to see the pervasive ineptitude at the highest levels. There is no method to our madness. The only semblance of substance you’ll occasionally encounter is the selective borrowing of UK or US law—sometimes applied correctly and in the right spirit—by a “celebrity judge,” who, more often than not, is a second- or third-generation insider, occasionally armed with an Ivy League or Oxbridge degree. Counsel on the other end will, in most cases, be a second-, third-, or fourth-generation senior advocate who has risen to the top more on the strength of politics than oratory.

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

I’m thinking of the following examples:

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

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

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

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