Hi everyone. Firstly I will tell my background so that you can assess from where I am speaking from.I am from a Non NLU and will graduate this year. My University follows a weird grading system and on top of that my grades are lower than average there too (Around barely 7 CGPA adjusting for NLU grading system).

My 12th grade CBSE grades are great however, and when I checked the equivalent requirements for various UK universities, it seems alright.

So I wanted to know, is it a good choice for me to do a 3 year LLB in UK, from a world famous university like Oxford, LSE, etc. Are there scholarships which I can avail and if so then how can I get that? Does it make sense to do it? Should I get an LOR from my school or my college?

Please help :3

OP here. Forgot to add the information here. I have a decent CV with Tier 1 and Tier 2 internship experiences., including callbacks and an assessment. Few paper presentations and publications.

My thought of doing a reputed foreign LLB, is for two reasons. The first one is a job at Magic Circle or Silver Circle law firms. The second one is self esteem needs (sometimes I tend to have thoughts that I have never experienced an excellent pedagogy in my college and that has made me a mediocre person. And that only an LLB at a world famous University can change me)

Better would be to see a psychiatrist!!!

When you already are going to pass BALLB, why on earth would you want to pursue another undergrad degree?

If you really were confident enough to get to UK univ., then you shoul have already tried for BCL, or other LLMs...what narcissistic rubbish was your post, buddy?

p.s. sorry for the lang., though!

As I told in my post my BA.LLB grades at my current college is shit . With those grades I am never making it to a BCL or even an LLM.

I don't understand why do you feel I am narcissistic. Mentioning that my 12th grades meets the grade equivalencey criteria of UK University is not narcissism. It's merely a fact. I never said that I am automatically qualified to be admitted there, because there are other factors like EC, SOP, LOR, etc

OP, don't engage with people who write such comments. Somehow, anybody who wants to do any sort of study in the UK makes many Indian lawyers very angry. Kicks off inferiority complexes in their heads. Just leave them alone. If you can succeed, you can succeed. If not, then not. They don't matter either way. On either side of that equation, they are just irritating noise. Leave them alone.

Your thought process makes no sense to me.

Firstly, you say you'd wish to do the LLB for a job at a Magic Circle or SC firm, as a solicitor, when the UK has no requirement of having an undergraduate degree in law to be eligible for those and just require the SQE. Why do you believe that having an LLB from India and adding another LLB from a UK university would make you more attractive when these firms look for things more than just bare legal knowledge?

Secondly, if you wish to experience excellent pedagogy, an LLM/BCL/Other specialized masters degree like the Oxford Masters in Law & Finance should appeal to you. You'd be building upon the foundations you already have of the law, instead of re-learning it. A masters degree would mean meaningful progression for you, as well as you getting to experience the academic prowess of apparently superior universities in a more meaningful way than you would with a second LLB.

To answer the first one. As I have said earlier. I am not from a premier college in India. The grading system our university follows is not a high scoring one. And on top of that my marks are low/below average.

Thank you for your second para. It's not as of BCL or LLM had not crossed my mind. But many are saying LLMs are useless for non academia jobs. And that BCL is primarily depended on your UG grade, which brings me back on square zero

This comment shows a very, very poor grasp indeed of the reality of how the UK legal market works. It is true that there may not be a "requirement" for an undergrad and yes, it is true that at many of the big firms, about 50% of their recruitment is done from applicants with non-law degrees.

However, remember those are people with UK non-law degrees. A partner at one of the MC firms, for example, has a degree in ancient history from UCL. Others are clacisists from Oxford. You haven't taken into account the British sense of insularity: with a foreign law degree, especially a non-top-five NLU one (read: a degree from a not-good university), it is hard to place you - gage where you are, etc. And anything that falls into that bracket is, in the majority of cases, easier to reject (from the point of view of a law firm graduate recruitment officer or partner unless there is substantial good stuff in other aspects of the profile), especially when that means "non-NLU". This blind recruitment stuff is increasingly happening, but not as common as pro-social mobility advocates would like. Remember all their talk about "social mobility" and broadening the base of universities they recruit from and so on is (1) the world's best packaged bullshit (the statistics speak for themselves - see who are the majority of folks getting into UK law firm jobs and promoted, people with UK Russell Group LLB or non-law degrees followed by SQE/PGDL etc); and (2) to the extent it is said in good faith and something they intend to do, that applies far more to their own context (Russell Group vs. non-RG and so on) rather than to our contexts. Indeed, they have reasons not to want to broaden their social mobility talk to our jurisdiction: already UK employers are getting blasted by politicians/the government about relying on foreign recruitment. Knowing how desperate Starmer is to show like he's clamping down on immigration, were I him and were I to hear that law firms are talking about social mobility in recruitment from non-UK jurisdictions, I would: (1) go to Nigel Farage's constituency office in Clacton-on-Sea; (2) hand him the keys to Downing Street; and (3) flee the country (or if I had a more traditional soldier-like sense of honour, ask the tough guys at the SAS base in Herefordshire for some of their pretty toys and use one of them to blow my brains out). That's how out of touch the writer of this comment is with the UK environment.

As for the non-law degree students themselves, I have myself observed the dynamics around those, having done a UK LLB and having run a student society at my uni dedicated to helping non-law students get into city law firm careers. The knowledge and skills gaps in most cases are quite significant and unless a particular non-law applicant were to be absolutely amazing in various ways, it would be very hard for them to get a TC. Were this applicant (I will use the word "applicant" instead of the social media slang "OP" for the sake of sophistication) to have the kind of background they do topped up by a UK LLB, they wouldn't be as hard to place. They would have some fancy stuff on their profiles which typical UK law students don't have, which would make it easier for them to get experiences that even UK law students with good profiles are fighting like cats and dogs for.

Finally, these master's programmes you mention? They are, at the end of the day, master's programmes. They are called master's programmes - and not regulated by the SRA's barrister counterpart, the BSB - for a reason. Because they are academic programmes. They don't help you get into a UK law firm job. Either better to do an NLU law degree like NLSIU BALLB and get in the way those kids do (and those guys are quite smart, so therefore can directly apply to vac schemes) without the bother of an LLM, or better to do something like what this applicant is contemplating.

There might be many reasons that this applicant might find what they are contemplating an unattractive course of action: immigration uncertainties, the rise of Farage, the UK economy being in a sorry state... but this logic needs much more problematising and scrutiny than what it is receiving.

PS: Sorry for the strong language in para 2 above. One of the things that irritates me about India is that many people seem to have a very flawed understanding of how the UK works and yet they are taken as experts. This included yours truly BTW, before I went there. Might still do so, to a certain extent, I suppose.

The only thing correct about this answer, which is what makes me feel like the Maths teacher marking the test paper of her favourite student and looking at a sum where he has started beautifully but ends up getting 1/5 because of fucking up, are six words you have used: "more than just bare legal knowledge" as an indication of what the types of law firms the OP is aiming at look for. The strongest way of showing the "bare legal knowledge" is a UK LLB. What you folks don't seem to understand is that just because they look at far more than this, doesn't mean an applicant can afford to have this foundation being weak. The fundamental first principles, foundations, whatever you like to call them, are far more important to them than you seem to realise. That's why even in the law firm applications they ask about A Level (or equivalent) grades. They might consider an NLSIU/NALSAR/NLUD/NUJS graduate as having a reasonably strong foundation requiring minimal retraining, but not for this person who is the OP of this post. And frankly, if I were them, I would say he has hit upon a long and hard, but ultimately worthy, road. This path proposed of doing Indian BALLB average + good foreign LLB (if it is possible to get it) is a good idea. It does not guarantee a MC/SC/biglaw job, but it is a much stronger foot forward than anything else the OP might choose to do. It also shows the OP willing to sacrifice aspects of their life - financial resources, time, energy, proximity from family and friends in being far away and the home comforts - to achieve what they want - and according to me, that is always something that looks good on an application.

My only word of caution to the OP: please don't take it for granted that you'll necessarily gain better marks in the foreign LLB. The expectations are high and good grades aren't easy to score, especially at the good UK unis. Be prepared to work your backsides off. If you hadn't done that at your Indian institute, pull all the mental resources together to do that if you do get a foreign LLB offer and take it up. You don't want a situation where you have a shitty Indian LLB and an average grade in your foreign LLB, because that is not likely to be too helpful either.

My dear chap. You've found the best possible recipe (IMV at least) (the one where rejection from something like an MC application is less likely than with your current background) for an Indian lawyer wanting to work in the UK these days. Yes. Absolutely worth doing an LLB from a good uni (I've done it myself, though I went directly after school, without having done any previous degrees from India). Certainly better than doing an LLM - which is a path that will not work for 99 cases out of 100 (and your background indicates that you are among those 99). If your mind has already gone to LLB instead of the default "I-can-do-LLM-then-get-MC/Biglaw-job" mindset that most kids with an Indian law degree (NLU or non-NLU) who want to work abroad have, then you already have one of the key qualities needed to succeed: a gritty sense of reality. That already sets you apart from the many Indian law graduates going to the UK for an LLM with the ultimate aim of working in a UK law firm. Many of these guys are good students, but their grasp on reality is so poor that for all practical purposes, they are fantacists. You are not, which makes you, in the real world, by default smarter than most of them. Good job on that, keep it up.

As for scholarships, those are few and far between and not in very high amounts, and each uni has its individual processes for those, look them up and make relevant enquiries. Therefore, my answer would require a bit of a caveat: "absolutely worth it if you can get scholarships or have the financial amounts needed to make such a huge commitment or a mixture of both". At the uni I attended, most of the scholarships were set aside for UK students from the bottom 15 to 20% income brackets of UK households. One way that might help with scholarships is doing very well on the LNAT.

Considering you've already studied law and got good internships on your CV, you might just find that you're having an easier time of it than your mates. But be warned, the fight for first year schemes, vac schemes and TCs is going to be a huge one and very psychologically draining. Be braced for many lonely, rainy days in your student housing where your blood pressure is at an all time high, awaiting that sweet email with a "yes" after you've made loads of applications, and then suddenly you've been brought to earth with a jolt because of law firm application rejections coming in. Even for the UK LLB students with the best profiles (be they home or international), for every vac scheme offer there are three (or more) rejections. That may sound scary but abstract at this stage, but when you've done all the graft of getting through, working hard and doing well at your law studies at your UK uni, having made the financial commitments etc etc and spent all those hours drafting, re-drafting and re-re-redrafting your applications over and over again, having done mock interview practice with your mates and your uni's careers office, it feels pretty shitty to get those rejections, especially if you don't end up making all that many friends and your family is living 5000 miles away. The trouble is, you'll have to just grit your teeth and summon up the determination to come back and fight another day (application cycle) and potentially even be ready to settle for having to get on a graduate visa (often wrongly called a "PSW visa" by students and universities alike) using which you can get something like paralegal experience after your LLB before getting a TC; even with this, if you come after 1 January 2027 (likely in your case), you will get only 18 months on your graduate visa instead of the two years that my lot had when we came a few years ago. Some of this may apply a little less to you, especially given your background, than both subsets of your mates: those (British and international) who've just come out of school/whose first degree is law, and those (British and international) who've taken other degrees at university, but in non-law subjects.

In any case, make up your mind soon whether you want to do this or not. Tuition fees for international students for a UK education are gonna shoot up like you've never seen before in the coming years. The government's being a bitch regarding immigration. They may be Labour, but they are like Boris Johnson of the Conservatives in that they are fantacists. They want to, as Boris did, have their cake and eat it. That is, they want to prevent British students from paying higher tuition, therefore keeping fundamentally the model where the system would have problems if the foreign money was cut off at source. And yet they want to reduce immigration, and one way they want to do that is by trying to reduce international student numbers. The way they have found to solve this logical contradiction is by imposing a tax on the universities based on the number of international students they take, which kicks in after, I think, the first 100 international students a uni recruits. That amount was set at the last budget at £925 per student. Remember your Economics 101, done either at school or at university: a uni doesn't absorb that tax. It passes it on. To whom? Students. Take that into account before getting into this. The tax kicks in after August 2028.

Finally, regarding your question of LOR, there are plenty of students from India on LinkedIn who've done previous uni degrees in India before UK LLB. Ask them, because I am honestly not sure in your case where would be the best for you to get those from. For those like me, it was certainly school.

PS: Not sure if this applies anymore, but before I went to the UK, there was a lot of talk about how Indian students who went with Indian board qualifications like CBSE were looked down on by admissions tutors at many of the elite names you mentioned (including both Oxford and LSE). I think this is less of a problem now, but still worth keeping in mind, I would think...

1. Basically, a lot of the scholarships (a) are set aside basis of financial aid for UK households; and (b) are of small amounts (a couple thousand pounds here and there).

2. Or alternatively, you might have scholarships for specific things like exceptional performance in your academic studies prior to coming to your UK university (or even exceptional performance while you are there) or other things, like if you want to practice or do pro bono volunteering in specific areas. Again, not very large amounts, at most a few thousand pounds.

It really depends on what arrangement(s) each uni has. Look up the LLB funding websites of various unis and see what you can avail yourself of.

Also, a trap to avoid: Many unis have a degree called the "LLB Senior Status". A two-year, faster version of the typical three year programme. Avoid at all costs. You need time to learn certain things, and two years usually isn't enough for that. Plus, while this wouldn't apply to you because of your Indian degree, the BCI does not recognise two-year qualifications, at least from what I last heard - haven't kept up with the rules because I am continuing to do stuff in the UK post LLB and the thought of having to go back is not really on the cards for me.