True - The intent of the forum is really for it to be a space to exchange ideas, make intelligent argument and to be entertaining. I don't know if this is currently achieved or it has veered too far off to one side though likewise we don't want to kill off debate. Will try to be a little stricter and see how it goes.
Thanks for your feedback. However, where do we draw the line? A proportion of students seems to enjoy this aspect of law school 'interaction' and do not want us to censor critical or 'cribbing' comments about other law schools. We are caught in the middle and generally only try to remove comments that are defamatory.
Shardul Shroff said that Rao is not the new head of tax: "Aseem started the practise. So Aseem, Nageshwar Rao and Gagan with others will create new verticals within tax for boosting the practice. Mekha Anand, Amit Singhania and Tushar Jarwal will support them."
Gopal Subramanium has now commented. "I was unaware of any attempt from the SRA to contact us," he said.
"I am taking steps to rectify the oversight immediately and will be in touch with the SRA on an urgent basis. Please reassure the community that i was not apprised and will attempt to ensure that Indian candidates will not be prejudiced," he told Legally India by email.
Hello. I won't get into major correspondence or explain reasons in much more details but I stand by my choices. I did not pick underdogs but my preference did perhaps go for the more adventurous posts.
In the cases of Jugaad and 377/365 what got me both times was their honesty and personal nature - something that many of the best and most powerful blogs in the world have in common.
These blogs, much like john2010's winning post last week, were courageous and honest, I learned a lot while reading them and thought they broke new ground.
Quality of writing is about more than just putting words together in a nice way, it's also about content and message that these words convey.
Usefulness is a very personal category also - and like I said, Jugaad is something that should be explored more openly and not just swept under the carpet.
...and good luck with CLAT and don't stress! If you have the drive, which you clearly seem to have, you will succeed in the profession no matter where you go!
Thanks for pointing out, the poll is fixed now and should be loading normally again. Made some back-end changes to the site late yesterday to speed it up which must have broken the polling functionality temporarily. Apologies for any inconvenience caused. Thanks, Kian
Thanks for your comments - please by all means, do post your comment and we publish around 95% of the time, particularly if it is not defamatory or overtly offensive against individuals.
I think this discussion has gone somewhat off tangent. Suffice it to say that the situation is more complicated than it appears but in this case I am convinced there is not a reason to make a big song and dance about the salary.
I think the original commenter was concerned that the firm was intentionally misleading graduates.
I can say with fair confidence that this is not the case and that the firm was acting honestly and there is nothing sinister going on.
We will not insist on seeing any offer letter and in the interest of the privacy of individuals involved will leave it at that for now, as also suggested by other commenters.
Your previous comment was not published because its language was in bad taste. By virtue of this being largely an anonymous forum we have to check up factual claims as we are obviously unable to "confirm it from the offer letter" as you write.
In this case the firm preferred not to disclose the precise figures but told me that the 20k figure was not correct and gave believable arguments. In this case, it might very well be a misunderstanding of some sort on either side. If this is an important issue, please get your friend to email or call me or to send me the offer letter confidentially as I have no other way of confirming your claim.
I have double checked a little and been assured by someone at the firm that it is definitely not 20k anywhere anymore, which I do have reason to believe. The problem as with many firms is there is some variance between locations, starting salaries are not very structured and are usually reviewed after 3 months at the firm. Maybe someone from the firm can shed some light on figures here.
It is really nothing sinister. It turns out that at least one of the magic circle firms has IP addresses in at least one office that actually mention the name of the firm when resolved to alphabetical domain names via an IP lookup. A few international firms or companies have such IP addresses, although I do not think any Indian law firms do. As a matter of routine we do not cross-check or resolve IP addresses of comments. And even if we did cross-check these, I promise you that we would keep this confidential as far as possible.
Some firms have requeseted for us to disclose IP addresses of commenters but we have always declined to do so and have strongly resisted threats of proceedings to force us to. Our servers are based in the UK and subject to stronger UK data protection laws.
Unless ordered by a court or law enforcement to disclose IP addresses, we will not do so.
Now the reason I did not want to say more is that from this you might be able to figure out which firm it is (if you had a lot of free time and no life), so we will leave it at that. Any comments naming or guessing the firm would obviously be moderated.
Plus it is quite a technical discussion and will probably bore most readers.
Hope that explains it.
Best regards Kian
ps: For those bored by this discussion, a short explanation: Every website you travel will receive your IP address, which is a unique number that (almost) every computer on the internet has. To find out your real identity from an IP address is usually difficult and normally requires your internet service provider to disclose this data. If you are worried/paranoid about this google for "anonymous proxy", which can enable you to browse the web more anonymously.
Indeed, obviously we don't mind the extra registered users at all, the more the merrier! (We are only 3,000-something registered users by the way, the newsletter only crossed 5,000).
But if there was a way to do a fair and easy popular vote any other way we would have tried. For example, using Facebook username to get unique votes would have been even worse with anyone out of hundreds of Facebook 'friends' being able to vote with just a click. At least most users who now vote seem to at least have read the posts they are voting for (I hope).
An earlier comment on using different technology would be limited too. The only other major method are cookies and those are also limited in application.
Anyway, thanks for all your input, at least the debate is keeping the process transparent. I think it is best if we keep the system as it is instead of making it even more complicated. Sure, the system can be gamed but so can any system.
See the below article or google for 'moot time marblecake' for a far more high profile and amusing example of popular voting gone wrong.
Let's just enjoy it for what it is within the parameters of the competition and keep things fair. And if bloggers or registered users want to 'jostle' with each other fine, but please keep anonymous name-calling of bloggers to a minimum.
In fact, please stop 'jostling' also, it doesn't really do anyone any favours. Friendly competition remains ok, of course.
We don't normally do this, but yes, can officially confirm that #24 and #17 is indeed from a magic circle firm.
Do note that unless requested by the author him or herself we will NEVER disclose any details about the location or identity of commenters nor use this for any stories, sourcing, etc.
Unrelated discussion from Facebook fan page on Noojie and NUJS-er: I said: "My experience is that not everyone outside of NUJS knows what Noojies are. And besides Google likes 'NUJS-ers' better than 'Noojies'."
A Facebooker replied: "also, in my first year i discovered that prior generations of 'NUJS-ers' considered being called 'noojies' to be derog."
I am interested - what is the PC thing to call an NUJS person? Please don't reply in the below thread as very off topic, but please let us know if you like being called 'Noojie' or there is another term in our forum:
I did briefly consider this earlier but the reason we did not do this was because only around 3,000 readers have a Legally India account, some of which are relatively inactive. This is only a small fraction of total blog readers and people who might want to vote but who would be unfairly disqualified. It also means total votes might only be a couple of dozens at most.
Technically the solution would be slightly complicated but not impossible to implement. But it would probably not be fair to discount the votes of anyone in this round since the rules were announced beforehand and people went through the effort of voting.
For the next category round, perhaps we can try this but I am concerned that not many votes would come in.
And even so, some users have been a lot more active than others on the Legally India social network and could end up lobbying for their votes with existing social network users or friends that are online also.
Again, will have to think about it. But perhaps the best way is to just request bloggers in future rounds not to do any overt lobbying or getting friends to vote and try to rely on this to an extent?
Another option is that we could try to condense and average all votes coming from the same IP addresses (which in some cases are law school library computers), although that at most would reduce vote tallies by only a few.
Or we could discount all votes that only voted for one blogger where they had an option of 3, or gave all their votes to the same blogger?
In short, I do not think there is an easy way that encourages reader participation in the process yet is completely unriggable. And any system that we announce can likely be circumvented if someone is serious about it anyway.
If you have any suggestions, by all means make them. No popular voting system is unriggable or impossible to influence and it seems whatever kind of popular vote we would come up with, someone would always be able to find a way to push it in their favour. Even 'hits' you can rig and are not objective.
The only option is to abandon the popular voting completely. But I think the process is a nice way for readers to engage in the competition and read some of the bloggers' older posts which they may have missed. Right now, judging by our records, a lot of the voting is happening along college lines, which is to be expected in any case for non-anonymous bloggers, irrespective of getting friends to vote.
And perhaps by the time the second set of category votes come even friends of bloggers will be bored with clicking for their friends and be more objective and go for quality. And bloggers do not have to waste their time, as you say, convincing friends to vote.
1. Yes, people are obviously getting friends to vote - not much anyone can do about it in any popular vote. Indeed this was foreseeable and expected, which is why the popular vote counts only for 25% of totals.
2. This is a popular vote. Therefore posts about the things people enjoy reading about deserve to get votes. Ultimately that is exactly what the popular vote is supposed to do: give some fair due to blogging that is popular. The independent judges will be just as unpredictable as the popular vote no doubt...
Hi - we are monitoring the voting process closely and making sure as far as possible that the same person does not create multiple accounts to vote for him or herself.
We have multiple techniques for doing this and will check up thoroughly on voting patterns if they prove to be suspicious.
There is of course a potential issue with getting friends to vote for you, which is an advantage if you do not blog anonymously. There is not much to be done on that front but this should be balanced out by the jury voting mechanism.
@2 naturalthing - Rewards for voters. Warm glow of supporting good legal writing? Suggestions on a post card please! :-)
Hello. The number mentioned is for email newsletter subscribers where it only counts readers who have signed up and confirmed their email address, so this only counts unique newsletter readers (unless someone signed up with two different email addresses).
Total unique visitors to the website are much higher than newsletter subscribers, which websites can count with tools such as Google Analytics.
BCI chairman Subramanium said: "The Bar Council will be considering Trilegal's letter in its forthcoming meeting on 22nd August. Trilegal is being asked to make a presentation."
Thanks - you are correct, "private" was not accurate with reference to ILS - we have now changed this.
About the insurance benefit, we will definitely bear this in mind - either we will try and expand to include this information for other recruiters also or remove in future.
Just a background correction on the first comment: Ryder emphasised that Scriboard as an entity would not be shut but take forward training and consultancy activities which were very close to his heart. Scriboard is also now registered as a trademark in a number of classes, which was not mentioned in the story.
Dear Drew - I believe that the ruling applies to international law firms advising on foreign law since technically they are not even allowed to do any Indian law work.
However, if theoretically a foreign law firm advised on Indian law, it would also be taxable under the ruling of course.
It's a fair observation. Essentially, because most M&A is private very rarely do the legal advisers get disclosed.
In a nutshell such league table data providers therefore have to tally up information reported on sites such as Legally India, in addition to information on deals sent directly by law firms to the data provider, as well as the data provider's own research.
Therefore, efforts by a firm to increase the data they publicly disseminate on deals will likely have an effect on rankings. Conversely, some law firms that disseminate very little deal information will be lower down in the rankings.
Furthermore, many clients only rarely give consent for a law firm to officially confirm that it is instructed, leaving large gaps in the data.
We accept it is not perfect but at the moment this is the best information available.
For law firms that are under-represented, we would request for you to send us and mergermarket your M&A deals more regularly so they get picked up in future league tables and more accurately reflect the work levels at firms.
Knowing Legal Dodo, I can independently confirm that Legal Dodo is not part of Rainmaker.
Also, Rainmaker and LST may have a common heritage and history, but as far as I know there is no financial or corporate relationship between the two entities anymore.
Thanks for pointing out - that should of course have read Aurangabad division bench of the Bombay High Court but was caused by a misguided attempt to shorten introduction to the article somewhat.
We have amended the copy to read "A High Court bench in Maharashtra" rather than "The Maharashtra High Court", which I realise might still leave room for objection but should be a little clearer.
Thanks for your comment but not at all related, at least not intentionally. And I do not see why hiring a lawyer from India should at all be related to the Chennai writ petition and no other readers seem to be making that link either.
Thanks, we intend to repost Mr Subramanium's comment but are liaising with him to also add some responses to several other frequently asked questions, which will hopefully be useful to all.
Yes, comments #7 and 8 are from Gopal Subramanium. Apologies for the delayed response, as our comment system had been acting up.
In cases such as these were people purport to be well-known individuals we will always attempt to confirm the identity before allowing the comment to go live.
I agree that comment #8 may be in somewhat bad taste but it is not defamatory and is merely expressing a personal opinion apparently based on personal experience.
The class of people if any, is not identifiable. The author only says "schools like La Martina (sic)" and "these students", which on a natural reading appears to be referring to unnamed individuals rather than all of the students.
Also, since the comment was posted with a username it did not require our approval in order to go live.
If you find it in very bad taste, please moderate the comment down with the voting buttons and it will be hidden.
I believe LegalPoet is on holiday at the moment and can not do any extensive moderation on comments.
Anyway, please let's not get into an extensive legal discussion on defamation and let's try to get back to the topical debate.
Any feedback?
"I am taking steps to rectify the oversight immediately and will be in touch with the SRA on an urgent basis. Please reassure the community that i was not apprised and will attempt to ensure that Indian candidates will not be prejudiced," he told Legally India by email.
http://www.legallyindia.com/1259-qlts-regulations-2010-impact-on-indian-lawyers
Hope it is useful and explains your queries.
Kian
In the cases of Jugaad and 377/365 what got me both times was their honesty and personal nature - something that many of the best and most powerful blogs in the world have in common.
These blogs, much like john2010's winning post last week, were courageous and honest, I learned a lot while reading them and thought they broke new ground.
Quality of writing is about more than just putting words together in a nice way, it's also about content and message that these words convey.
Usefulness is a very personal category also - and like I said, Jugaad is something that should be explored more openly and not just swept under the carpet.
Best,
Kian
I think the original commenter was concerned that the firm was intentionally misleading graduates.
I can say with fair confidence that this is not the case and that the firm was acting honestly and there is nothing sinister going on.
We will not insist on seeing any offer letter and in the interest of the privacy of individuals involved will leave it at that for now, as also suggested by other commenters.
Best regards,
Kian
In this case the firm preferred not to disclose the precise figures but told me that the 20k figure was not correct and gave believable arguments. In this case, it might very well be a misunderstanding of some sort on either side. If this is an important issue, please get your friend to email or call me or to send me the offer letter confidentially as I have no other way of confirming your claim.
Many thanks,
Kian
Best, Kian
Best regards
Kian
Best regards,
Kian
Kian
Some firms have requeseted for us to disclose IP addresses of commenters but we have always declined to do so and have strongly resisted threats of proceedings to force us to. Our servers are based in the UK and subject to stronger UK data protection laws.
Unless ordered by a court or law enforcement to disclose IP addresses, we will not do so.
Now the reason I did not want to say more is that from this you might be able to figure out which firm it is (if you had a lot of free time and no life), so we will leave it at that. Any comments naming or guessing the firm would obviously be moderated.
Plus it is quite a technical discussion and will probably bore most readers.
Hope that explains it.
Best regards
Kian
ps: For those bored by this discussion, a short explanation: Every website you travel will receive your IP address, which is a unique number that (almost) every computer on the internet has. To find out your real identity from an IP address is usually difficult and normally requires your internet service provider to disclose this data. If you are worried/paranoid about this google for "anonymous proxy", which can enable you to browse the web more anonymously.
Kian
Best regards,
Kian
Hopefully we can post up results of the first round soon, we are just collating the judges' votes and checking the public vote for irregularities.
Please bear with us.
Kian
Kian
For queries on the bar exam please call the helplines on 011 4922 5022 (English) or 011 4922 5023 (Hindi) or email barexam@barcouncilofindia.org
Best regards
Kian
But if there was a way to do a fair and easy popular vote any other way we would have tried. For example, using Facebook username to get unique votes would have been even worse with anyone out of hundreds of Facebook 'friends' being able to vote with just a click. At least most users who now vote seem to at least have read the posts they are voting for (I hope).
An earlier comment on using different technology would be limited too. The only other major method are cookies and those are also limited in application.
Anyway, thanks for all your input, at least the debate is keeping the process transparent. I think it is best if we keep the system as it is instead of making it even more complicated. Sure, the system can be gamed but so can any system.
See the below article or google for 'moot time marblecake' for a far more high profile and amusing example of popular voting gone wrong.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/time-magazine-throws-up-its-hands-as-it-gets-pwned-by-4chan/
Let's just enjoy it for what it is within the parameters of the competition and keep things fair. And if bloggers or registered users want to 'jostle' with each other fine, but please keep anonymous name-calling of bloggers to a minimum.
In fact, please stop 'jostling' also, it doesn't really do anyone any favours. Friendly competition remains ok, of course.
Happy blogging/voting!
Kian
Do note that unless requested by the author him or herself we will NEVER disclose any details about the location or identity of commenters nor use this for any stories, sourcing, etc.
Best regards,
Kian
I said: "My experience is that not everyone outside of NUJS knows what Noojies are. And besides Google likes 'NUJS-ers' better than 'Noojies'."
A Facebooker replied: "also, in my first year i discovered that prior generations of 'NUJS-ers' considered being called 'noojies' to be derog."
I am interested - what is the PC thing to call an NUJS person? Please don't reply in the below thread as very off topic, but please let us know if you like being called 'Noojie' or there is another term in our forum:
http://www.legallyindia.com/Law-schools-and-students/1841-Noojie-or-NUJS-er-or-NUJS-ian-Nooji-ite#1841
Otherwise we'll have to continue with NUJS-er in headlines, which looks a bit silly...
Thanks,
Kian
ps: Thanks #26, much appreciated!
That is a good idea indeed.
I did briefly consider this earlier but the reason we did not do this was because only around 3,000 readers have a Legally India account, some of which are relatively inactive. This is only a small fraction of total blog readers and people who might want to vote but who would be unfairly disqualified. It also means total votes might only be a couple of dozens at most.
Technically the solution would be slightly complicated but not impossible to implement. But it would probably not be fair to discount the votes of anyone in this round since the rules were announced beforehand and people went through the effort of voting.
For the next category round, perhaps we can try this but I am concerned that not many votes would come in.
And even so, some users have been a lot more active than others on the Legally India social network and could end up lobbying for their votes with existing social network users or friends that are online also.
Again, will have to think about it. But perhaps the best way is to just request bloggers in future rounds not to do any overt lobbying or getting friends to vote and try to rely on this to an extent?
Another option is that we could try to condense and average all votes coming from the same IP addresses (which in some cases are law school library computers), although that at most would reduce vote tallies by only a few.
Or we could discount all votes that only voted for one blogger where they had an option of 3, or gave all their votes to the same blogger?
In short, I do not think there is an easy way that encourages reader participation in the process yet is completely unriggable. And any system that we announce can likely be circumvented if someone is serious about it anyway.
Will keep an open mind on the issue.
Thanks for your suggestions,
Kian
If you have any suggestions, by all means make them. No popular voting system is unriggable or impossible to influence and it seems whatever kind of popular vote we would come up with, someone would always be able to find a way to push it in their favour. Even 'hits' you can rig and are not objective.
The only option is to abandon the popular voting completely. But I think the process is a nice way for readers to engage in the competition and read some of the bloggers' older posts which they may have missed. Right now, judging by our records, a lot of the voting is happening along college lines, which is to be expected in any case for non-anonymous bloggers, irrespective of getting friends to vote.
And perhaps by the time the second set of category votes come even friends of bloggers will be bored with clicking for their friends and be more objective and go for quality. And bloggers do not have to waste their time, as you say, convincing friends to vote.
Kian
1. Yes, people are obviously getting friends to vote - not much anyone can do about it in any popular vote. Indeed this was foreseeable and expected, which is why the popular vote counts only for 25% of totals.
2. This is a popular vote. Therefore posts about the things people enjoy reading about deserve to get votes. Ultimately that is exactly what the popular vote is supposed to do: give some fair due to blogging that is popular. The independent judges will be just as unpredictable as the popular vote no doubt...
Happy blogging/voting!
Kian
We have multiple techniques for doing this and will check up thoroughly on voting patterns if they prove to be suspicious.
There is of course a potential issue with getting friends to vote for you, which is an advantage if you do not blog anonymously. There is not much to be done on that front but this should be balanced out by the jury voting mechanism.
@2 naturalthing - Rewards for voters. Warm glow of supporting good legal writing? Suggestions on a post card please! :-)
Best
Kian
Total unique visitors to the website are much higher than newsletter subscribers, which websites can count with tools such as Google Analytics.
Best regards
Kian
About the insurance benefit, we will definitely bear this in mind - either we will try and expand to include this information for other recruiters also or remove in future.
Best regards,
Kian
Kian
But is a company that was started (is this right?) and is based in Kerala not a Keralan company? Much like General Motors is an American car maker?
Anyway...
Best regards,
Kian
Have a look:
http://ventureintelligence.in/league.htm
http://ventureintelligence.in/leaguelaw-ma.htm
However, Amarchand for example seems to not feature at all in that one.
No league table is perfect but as far as I have found, mergermarkets' is currently the best one available.
Best regards,
Kian
However, if theoretically a foreign law firm advised on Indian law, it would also be taxable under the ruling of course.
Best regards,
Kian
Please see the below published earlier today:
http://www.legallyindia.com/201007201115/Tax/how-linklaters-tax-ruling-affects-foreign-professionals-wide-ramifications-questionable-more-litigation-certain
In a nutshell such league table data providers therefore have to tally up information reported on sites such as Legally India, in addition to information on deals sent directly by law firms to the data provider, as well as the data provider's own research.
Therefore, efforts by a firm to increase the data they publicly disseminate on deals will likely have an effect on rankings. Conversely, some law firms that disseminate very little deal information will be lower down in the rankings.
Furthermore, many clients only rarely give consent for a law firm to officially confirm that it is instructed, leaving large gaps in the data.
We accept it is not perfect but at the moment this is the best information available.
For law firms that are under-represented, we would request for you to send us and mergermarket your M&A deals more regularly so they get picked up in future league tables and more accurately reflect the work levels at firms.
Best regards,
Kian
Best regards
Kian
Also, Rainmaker and LST may have a common heritage and history, but as far as I know there is no financial or corporate relationship between the two entities anymore.
Best,
Kian
We have amended the copy to read "A High Court bench in Maharashtra" rather than "The Maharashtra High Court", which I realise might still leave room for objection but should be a little clearer.
Best,
Kian
Best regards,
Kian
Best regards,
Kian
In cases such as these were people purport to be well-known individuals we will always attempt to confirm the identity before allowing the comment to go live.
Best regards
Kian
Best regards
Kian
I agree that comment #8 may be in somewhat bad taste but it is not defamatory and is merely expressing a personal opinion apparently based on personal experience.
The class of people if any, is not identifiable. The author only says "schools like La Martina (sic)" and "these students", which on a natural reading appears to be referring to unnamed individuals rather than all of the students.
Also, since the comment was posted with a username it did not require our approval in order to go live.
If you find it in very bad taste, please moderate the comment down with the voting buttons and it will be hidden.
I believe LegalPoet is on holiday at the moment and can not do any extensive moderation on comments.
Anyway, please let's not get into an extensive legal discussion on defamation and let's try to get back to the topical debate.
Best regards,
Kian
Thanks to all commenters expressing confidence in Legally India's ability to compile a better law school ranking.
We would love to, however, we will only do so once we are able to do a credible job of it.
Right now, I think we are not quite there yet but we have some ideas to hopefully get there some point.
If you have any thoughts on how the present ranking could be improved, please also leave a comment, we are always very happy to hear from you.
Best regards,
Kian