Partners after 10-15 PQE earn far lesser than their equally successful litigation counterparts, all the while having to bring in 2-3x revenue atleast to take back home what they take back home. A decently successful one after 10PQE will be earning 1-3cr. That after 20-25 PQE will be earning 5-20cr, and outliers will be there. Your litigation counterparts will be outearning these people by a factor of 2-3 easily..

Some content creators make that in an hour, some engineers make that in a week. Ambani makes that in a second.

What's the point you are trying to make? Can we just live and try to earn a living without some douchebag comparing it to something else?

Why don't you go and join a PE fund?

The Indian Tier 1s are a bubble, and the math has never been honest. Roughly 700 lawyers per firm funnel into 150 to 200 PA slots, all waiting for partnership letters that will arrive for maybe one in fifteen of them. Firms over hire to handle deal flow that may not recur, then thin the pyramid quietly when it doesn’t. The deeper problem is what the structure produces. You spend a decade learning to service relationships you did not originate, on matters routed to you by partners whose business cards still carry the firm’s logo and not yours. You learn execution, which is real. You do not learn the thing that actually keeps a lawyer employed past forty: how to make a client pick up the phone and call you, specifically. Book building is a discipline, not a personality trait. It requires years in rooms where you have no standing, building peer relationships with people who are not yet GCs and not yet founders. It requires you to write things, lose things, and be visible in ways the firm hierarchy quietly punishes. The Tier 1 model was not built for this. It was built to extract maximum leverage from the pyramid while the going is good. Job security in this market is portable business. Everything else is the firm’s security, not yours. The senior associate with two captive clients of her own has more leverage than the salaried partner with none. The lateral market knows this. The pyramid does too, eventually.