We want LI to be one of the friendliest places on the internet, where lawyers and law students help each other with their career related queries and occasionally discuss other stuff that might affect their lives too. In other words:
1. Be kind, respectful and helpful to each other.
2. Be bona fide, truthful, genuine and curious.
3. Assume the best intention of others.
Therefore, in using the site, you must agree to do your best to uphold these community guidelines.
Note that what you find here is written and moderated by anonymous people on the internet.
Therefore everything you read here is very likely unverified, rumour, speculation and/or downright false.
In continuing to read anything here, you must therefore agree not to take anything you read here as factual and that you will exercise due caution, diligence and common sense before acting on any information you may come across here.
You also agree to report any inaccurate or malicious comments with the buttons. Moderators take action within 24 hours, as required and appropriate under law.
Our full terms and conditions apply too.
Do you solemnly agree to all of the above?
if you want to be a solicitor in the UK, the first question you have to answer is what extra can you bring to the table? ambition is not enough, what would be your USP? to be a fully qualified solicitor you need 2 PQE and pass SQE 1&2. You can do the prep with online courses from Uni of law (they were Aakash of the UK, now they have become a uni). However, once you are qualified what are you going to do next? Law firms dont want to hire international students/solicitors (unless they bring something special), they want pale male stale even if the brochures look suspiciously well balanced. to become an independent solicitor you would need around 3 crores INR, if you walk the streets of southall or any of the ethnically dominated streets you would find such street lawyers on each corner, they charge 1500 GBP for filing immigration application (not assylum but just regular visa application). Would you like to hustle?
if you dont want to go the SQE route, you can check out the CILEX, this is like a part time lawyer route, you can do conveyancing and a bunch of other stuff, however, with gne-AI coming in most of the low level drafting stuff is out of the window, clients now dont want to spend 5000 GBP for lawyers, they would represent themselves in the court, FT has a nice article on impact of AI on low level lawyers, who are now starved of clients, the court system is quite streamlined in the UK, so navigating is not a problem, previously the value added from solicitors were they would draft the petitiotn, however, now AI can do a better job for example in an employment tribunal where the matters are mostly factual with a sprinkling of law.
the only thing that you can do without much effort is to become an immigration adviser, you need to pass a couple of exams IAA. prep in india, Come to the UK on a tourist visa, give exam go back. once you pass the exam, find out the cheapest masters programme in a third rate uni, costs should be less than 10k GBP, come to the UK, open your own shop giving immigration advice, get on the assylum panel, you would print money, after your degree you have 18 more months of post study visa, your aim should be earn as much as you can, so that you can apply for the own company visa (target is 80k pa, if you can get 80 clients, you shall reach that). or you can do what a lot of South Asians do, find a british person and marry them.