@6 Actually my completely personal opinion is that The Lawyers Collective, Jaisingh and Anand Grover are doing great work, which should be encouraged and I have a lot of respect for.
I am also pretty certain that there is no impropriety in funding going on, contrary to beliefs in some quarters.
The reason the comments were not moderated is because they did not appear defamatory but were merely expressing an opinion and opened debate. Will tone down the initial comment, however, particularly in light of the authors later response.
Chinese weddings are the next big thing, I promise - Indian weddings are very passe after all the Hollywood celebs have done them.
However, getting visas for marrying in China is difficult, so first we need to find someone who can fake Chinese passports. Around 200 fake passports would be good initial investment.
I recently bought a good colour inkjet printer, we can get started with that.
Then we will build a website where we connect people who want to have a wedding in China, legally.
A goldmine. Get going BB.
Can we make your milk-cow a partner too na? We really need a marketing director.
Although LegallyChina is a good idea. Have registered the domain now, following Bihari's suggestion. It will be a marriage website to get a Chinese passport.
If anyone is interested to help run it, please let me know.
@43 - I don't know who drafted the letter and we probably would not publish this on a public forum to preserve their anonymity.
If you are interested you could get in touch with Shamnad Basheer (contact details on his Spicy IP blog), who would be able to confer with the students on whether they want their names to be public/passed on to you.
Thanks for the constructive idea 44. By all means, that would be ideal, but is there any realistic way to get accurate information on all activities of a batch? Is such data collated in a centralised place?
We have followed up with Placement Committee Coordinator (PCC) Tapan Mohanty to explain the PCC process in more detail, particularly in response to #36.
He explained: "If someone wants a placement then they must meet the minimum standard that is at least clear all papers before 14th trimester.
Then again some people decided to appear for judiciary at the end of their fifth year and PCC can't guarantee anybody who joined would not leave on his or her own.
Finally, these students who went to Supreme Court and deposed before the honourable judges that they are interested in the job and if they were not then should not have applied. One cannot play with the Supreme Court and butcher the integrity of institutions by lying to the judges of the highest court of the country.
Another thing is that Universities are institutions of learning and disseminators of knowledge not a placement agency.
We only facilitate the process and act as a conduit between the recruiter and candidates.
Further to it must be added the efforts of students in getting PPOs and the quality of teaching and reputation of the institution as well as the efforts of these students are complementary to the placement process.
Neither they are independent nor are they contradictory. Would these students manage their placement if they would had graduated from A, B, or C college from a muffosil town?"
We are scheduled to speak to HNLU tomorrow, which just finished its recruitment apparently. Symbiosis we are lining up for next week. Nalsar we hope to publish the figures tomorrow.
We do appreciate that it is possible for recruitment committees to game or massage the figures somewhat, although we would expect committee members to display the integrity to be truthful on a public forum about such information.
So far we have had no reason to doubt this.
If any students from any of the colleges wish to dispute the figures or think there are inaccuracies, please get in touch with us directly and confidentially and we'd like to discuss.
Thanks for your support. On the other hand arguments could be made on the other side of this coin too. The post was definitely borderline of the blogging rules, but it also struck a nerve and addressed a potentially interesting topic.
Ultimately we will err on the side of caution in deleting blog posts, unless they start becoming spammy and a big problem.
I think posting to interesting blog posts is fine, and should in fact be encouraged, if they have information that is relevant to the topic at hand.
We would in fact have probably included a link to Corporate Law Blog or Law and Legal Developments ourselves if they were published at the time of going to press.
Re: Ambani's gas: I hear that is the plan - word on the street was that the judgment was almost handed down several times this week but will more likely now happen next week.
But in any case, the verdict is almost definitely expected before Balakrishnan resigns.
On another note, makes you wonder - maybe having all judges resign every three months could drastically reduce pendency of cases?
Purely by age Kapadia is nowhere near the oldest currently serving Supreme Court judge although he is by far the most senior judge by number of SC years.
If anyone can shed some more light and knowledge on this process would be interesting.
But really really? I have heard this from another ex-NLS-ite recently actually but am not at all sure how this article is biased exactly.
NLS was the lead of the article with a dramatic opener of just missing its chance to defend the title. That surely was the main news right there, plus it then goes into lots of compliments about how close the final was, how NLS won it last year, etc.
The second-most interesting angle was surely NUJS' return to form and climbing of another MPL place. NLS by contrast stayed in second place.
If you really disagree, please do let me know.
We are still checking whether this moot has honourable mentions - Mr Lee said when we spoke earlier this week that it did not, but we will double check.
We have double checked some of the figures with students and others and have found they are broadly accurate.
Here are some more details from the recruitment committee:
The total number of people with firms is 56 including places like Juris Corp, ITC, IFMR, Sanderson Morgans and Rohit Das Associates.
The rest are distributed between taking up research assistant positions at NUJS and joining law chambers of various High Court and Supreme Court lawyers. At the request of the students details of those were not published.
Several in-house companies are still visiting and the committee is still confident of reaching its target.
Always happy to hear readers' feedback, hope that makes sense.
Best regards, Kian
ps: As headed in our table, the figures we listed were only a sample and nowhere near complete.
The associate survey did not have enough data to reliably give an indication of JSA senior associate salaries actually.
From what I understand a proportion of JSA associate and retained partner salaries are very flexible and performance based, assessed on the basis of a matrix taking into account a number of factors (including non-fee-earning factors).
Hope that clarifies somewhat.
Best, Kian
Ps: We will preview the associate survey with some other data in the coming weeks as some unclear parts of it have come to light and need to be double checked. Will keep you posted - again, apologies for the delay.
Hi - we will be moderating the Trilegal part of this comment thread more strictly as there appear to be mostly unsubstantiated to-and-fro and allegations between two readers here, which is not terribly productive.
Please keep comments non-personal if possible, even if they are positive.
If anyone who is mentioned by name here would prefer to have their name redacted, please contact me or leave a comment saying so (include contact details please, they won't be published).
@9, I have enquired with mergermarket and they have given the following response:
The criteria are: "The mergermarket database includes Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) where there is a transfer in ownership of an economic interest in an ongoing business concern."
They add: "If there is a change in the ownership, we do treat it as M&A. It does not matter whether the bidder is a PE firm or not. If some deals are excluded from the database, it is because of other reasons."
They are happy to investigate further if you have any specific queries.
A quick response to the scoring criteria. As we outlined previously for this MPL season we will have to stick with the criteria that were published and openly available for several months.
If we make changes at this late stage of the competition, however reasonable those changes would be, it would be equally unfair to other competitors.
But we are taking those suggestions on board and will definitely incorporate many of these changes and suggestions for the MPL 2. We also have some exciting ideas about how to improve next seasons' MPL and look forward to telling you all about it.
An unrelated point, re comment #4 - not wanting to get into huge detail or make excuses but the incorrect spelling of Subhang Nair's name was actually mistakenly sent to us by email from the organiser of the moot.
Thanks for your comment and some of the valid points and thought provoking points you raise - apologies for the delayed response, which I hope addresses some of your queries.
Journalism is based, to a large extent, about building long-term relationships where you find out whether you can trust sources and rely on the information they give you.
A lot of this is based on gut-feeling and experience as it is impossible within time constraints to triple-check every single piece of information when it comes from a normally trusted source.
In this case, we have actually spoken anonymously to several associates to confirm the actual bonus figures and other details. However, we are investigating the starting salary and will come up with measures to deal with and correct this, if necessary.
The anonymous comments by their nature are able to be much more critical than any balanced news article ever can be. Part of the reason these go up largely unmoderated is so that there can be transparency about news and things that are wrong can be highlighted by readers.
Hopefully, they also help in bringing out the truth through reasoned debate.
However, I disagree that we only ever run positive stories - we regularly publish a number of stories that point out difficulties in firms or other organisations when there is sufficient evidence for it.
Partly, negative stories also take much more time to fully research and stand-up and we are currently somewhat short-staffed with the volume of news that is coming out of law firms.
I would love to be able to take on a larger team, of course to be able to do proper investigative reporting, but with "enrichment" as you put it still expectedly a long, long time away, we have to do the best we can with the current resources.
Smileys are disabled in the comments, although the front-page 'latest comments' does render them. Don't know which ones but would assume perhaps only :-) ;-) :sad: and :P
Maybe some others...
But be creative if you really want to use smileys in good old fashioned text-only - they look much prettier anyway, IMHO.
Although in blogging (or in any writing), if something is well written there should not be a need for smileys to clarify the meaning or intent. Just my old-fashioned two-cents.
Not true, I think there are some very very good bloggers coming out of the woodwork and finding their voice and it'll be a really tough call to pick the 'best'.
I also hope to be able to do a round-up of blogging action so far, elaborate on some more criteria, and outline new prize categories.
Unfortunately I have been travelling for the past three weeks so have fallen a little behind but will get to it ASAP.
@12 - thanks for your comment and I appreciate your view.
However, Narendra Modi has very little to do with mooting and I don't think it would be in anyone's interest if the thread to this story turned into a back-and-forth on a topic this divisive that has nothing to do with mooting.
By all means, if it is an issue of concern, please feel free to write a blog or post on our forum about it, where a proper debate can be had on the topic.
We can not confirm at present whether this is an accurate and final version of the petition but understand that it is close to the version which is being served on the respondents.
@22 very good point and one to look into. I have no way of getting in touch with you... Could you email me please (Kian.Ganz at Legallyindia dot com) or send me a direct message over the site?
I agree that developing market would be interesting, but there is also less data available in many others. China's legal market anecdotally has had huge growth and practices, many of which are from international firms...
In response to your queries, we only write about reports when there is some interesting news or data in it that is worth writing about.
The associate engagement survey - again, apologies for the delay. It really should be around the corner now, at least the first part. It's one of those things that always slips or some news breaks and it gets pushed aside. Completely unacceptable, I agree, was going to have it done this week...
We will cover the findings of the RSG report in more detail soon.
One reason we do not cover awards is partly because there is such a large number of rankings, reports and awards that it is very difficult to draw the line at which is worth covering and which is not - we get a good number of emails from award organisers asking for coverage.
Second, the majority of awards, rankings and awards are not very good. For Legally India to report that Award X has decided that Y is the best law firm in India is a little meaningless.
Each Award has its own methodology and credibility and some are better than others, which is hard to evaluate without being part of the judging process.
Also, personally I feel that most established law firm rankings and awards are just not very interesting or enlightening.
I hope that kind of content is not too sorely missed but please let me know if you really want to read about it and will consider.
Hi, We have received a request to delete comments 99, 101 and 102 above. Can whoever got in touch anonymously please provide a reason for removal? Would help if you could also include your name and/or contact email so we can liaise if necessary.
@31 - Thank you very much, I am very happy to hear you like the site.
No problem about criticism at all. I actually think it's great that I get to hear these things and find out which stories readers enjoy and which they don't.
It is a rare privilege in publishing to get instant feedback so please, feel free to criticise absolutely anytime, will always be welcome! Debate is good.
First of all, apologies for the late response as I am currently travelling.
@29 and others- I do disagree somewhat. I wrote in my original comment that this "sheds light on" the firm's expansion strategies, which it does.
If a firm decides to expand in its existing office by taking on a lease of another floor, that is certainly evidence of a strategy of some sort and you can bet that senior partners will have discussed this before deciding on it. Property is a large part of their fixed cost for most law firms.
The alternative could have been to say, we are fine with existing space and size in Delhi and would prefer to focus on other offices or cities.
But in a sense what constitutes "expansion strategy" and what does not is a fine line and I agree that there could be valid criticism of the term I used in my original comment.
I am also pretty certain that there is no impropriety in funding going on, contrary to beliefs in some quarters.
Read our feature from last year:
http://www.legallyindia.com/20090817134/Interviews/The-lawyer-who-fought-the-377-law-and-won-Anand-Grover
The reason the comments were not moderated is because they did not appear defamatory but were merely expressing an opinion and opened debate. Will tone down the initial comment, however, particularly in light of the authors later response.
Best,
Kian
Plus I am playing around trying to get the Facebook "like" button to work properly, so I had to "like" something... ;-)
Chinese weddings are the next big thing, I promise - Indian weddings are very passe after all the Hollywood celebs have done them.
However, getting visas for marrying in China is difficult, so first we need to find someone who can fake Chinese passports. Around 200 fake passports would be good initial investment.
I recently bought a good colour inkjet printer, we can get started with that.
Then we will build a website where we connect people who want to have a wedding in China, legally.
A goldmine. Get going BB.
Can we make your milk-cow a partner too na? We really need a marketing director.
(h) dabbawala moonlighting.
Although LegallyChina is a good idea. Have registered the domain now, following Bihari's suggestion. It will be a marriage website to get a Chinese passport.
If anyone is interested to help run it, please let me know.
Did not want to list his entire CV, although realise in retrospect that would have avoided some confusion.
If you are interested you could get in touch with Shamnad Basheer (contact details on his Spicy IP blog), who would be able to confer with the students on whether they want their names to be public/passed on to you.
Best,
Kian
But this one was illustrative since some readers were wondering what kind of work Naik Paranjpe did, in our earlier story.
Best, Kian
All help/advice would be appreciated.
Kian
We have followed up with Placement Committee Coordinator (PCC) Tapan Mohanty to explain the PCC process in more detail, particularly in response to #36.
He explained: "If someone wants a placement then they must meet the minimum standard that is at least clear all papers before 14th trimester.
Then again some people decided to appear for judiciary at the end of their fifth year and PCC can't guarantee anybody who joined would not leave on his or her own.
Finally, these students who went to Supreme Court and deposed before the honourable judges that they are interested in the job and if they were not then should not have applied. One cannot play with the Supreme Court and butcher the integrity of institutions by lying to the judges of the highest court of the country.
Another thing is that Universities are institutions of learning and disseminators of knowledge not a placement agency.
We only facilitate the process and act as a conduit between the recruiter and candidates.
Further to it must be added the efforts of students in getting PPOs and the quality of teaching and reputation of the institution as well as the efforts of these students are complementary to the placement process.
Neither they are independent nor are they contradictory. Would these students manage their placement if they would had graduated from A, B, or C college from a muffosil town?"
We are scheduled to speak to HNLU tomorrow, which just finished its recruitment apparently. Symbiosis we are lining up for next week. Nalsar we hope to publish the figures tomorrow.
Kian
We do appreciate that it is possible for recruitment committees to game or massage the figures somewhat, although we would expect committee members to display the integrity to be truthful on a public forum about such information.
So far we have had no reason to doubt this.
If any students from any of the colleges wish to dispute the figures or think there are inaccuracies, please get in touch with us directly and confidentially and we'd like to discuss.
Best regards,
Kian
We will persevere - or if any NLU Jodhpur students have some information, please do get in touch with us directly and confidentially.
Best,
Kian
http://thenujsblogs.blogspot.com/2010/03/second-nujs-fiction-competition.html
for more information.
Vaneesha Jain was the convenor.
Happy writing,
Kian
Ultimately we will err on the side of caution in deleting blog posts, unless they start becoming spammy and a big problem.
Best,
Kian
We have simply moved Vasanth's posts to this section rather than keeping a separate cartoon box on the front-page.
Kian
I think posting to interesting blog posts is fine, and should in fact be encouraged, if they have information that is relevant to the topic at hand.
We would in fact have probably included a link to Corporate Law Blog or Law and Legal Developments ourselves if they were published at the time of going to press.
Best,
Kian
But in any case, the verdict is almost definitely expected before Balakrishnan resigns.
On another note, makes you wonder - maybe having all judges resign every three months could drastically reduce pendency of cases?
Just a thought.
Best,
Kian
If anyone can shed some more light and knowledge on this process would be interesting.
Best,
Kian
But really really? I have heard this from another ex-NLS-ite recently actually but am not at all sure how this article is biased exactly.
NLS was the lead of the article with a dramatic opener of just missing its chance to defend the title. That surely was the main news right there, plus it then goes into lots of compliments about how close the final was, how NLS won it last year, etc.
The second-most interesting angle was surely NUJS' return to form and climbing of another MPL place. NLS by contrast stayed in second place.
If you really disagree, please do let me know.
We are still checking whether this moot has honourable mentions - Mr Lee said when we spoke earlier this week that it did not, but we will double check.
Best,
Kian
Best,
Kian
Here are some more details from the recruitment committee:
The total number of people with firms is 56 including places like Juris Corp, ITC, IFMR, Sanderson Morgans and Rohit Das Associates.
The rest are distributed between taking up research assistant positions at NUJS and joining law chambers of various High Court and Supreme Court lawyers. At the request of the students details of those were not published.
Several in-house companies are still visiting and the committee is still confident of reaching its target.
Always happy to hear readers' feedback, hope that makes sense.
Best regards,
Kian
ps: As headed in our table, the figures we listed were only a sample and nowhere near complete.
From what I understand a proportion of JSA associate and retained partner salaries are very flexible and performance based, assessed on the basis of a matrix taking into account a number of factors (including non-fee-earning factors).
Hope that clarifies somewhat.
Best,
Kian
Ps: We will preview the associate survey with some other data in the coming weeks as some unclear parts of it have come to light and need to be double checked. Will keep you posted - again, apologies for the delay.
Best,
Kian
If anyone who is mentioned by name here would prefer to have their name redacted, please contact me or leave a comment saying so (include contact details please, they won't be published).
Best regards,
Kian
The criteria are: "The mergermarket database includes Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) where there is a transfer in ownership of an economic interest in an ongoing business concern."
They add: "If there is a change in the ownership, we do treat it as M&A. It does not matter whether the bidder is a PE firm or not. If some deals are excluded from the database, it is because of other reasons."
They are happy to investigate further if you have any specific queries.
Best,
Kian
And in the UK the weather is atrocious.
Every place has its problems and India is better than many, in my humble opinion.
I will check with mergermarket and revert.
Best,
Kian
Hope this clarifies things - I can see it can look a little unclear.
Thanks,
Kian
A quick response to the scoring criteria. As we outlined previously for this MPL season we will have to stick with the criteria that were published and openly available for several months.
If we make changes at this late stage of the competition, however reasonable those changes would be, it would be equally unfair to other competitors.
But we are taking those suggestions on board and will definitely incorporate many of these changes and suggestions for the MPL 2. We also have some exciting ideas about how to improve next seasons' MPL and look forward to telling you all about it.
An unrelated point, re comment #4 - not wanting to get into huge detail or make excuses but the incorrect spelling of Subhang Nair's name was actually mistakenly sent to us by email from the organiser of the moot.
Anyway, happy mooting!
Kian
We will update once confirmed.
Best regards,
Kian
Best regards,
Kian
Thanks for your comment and some of the valid points and thought provoking points you raise - apologies for the delayed response, which I hope addresses some of your queries.
Journalism is based, to a large extent, about building long-term relationships where you find out whether you can trust sources and rely on the information they give you.
A lot of this is based on gut-feeling and experience as it is impossible within time constraints to triple-check every single piece of information when it comes from a normally trusted source.
In this case, we have actually spoken anonymously to several associates to confirm the actual bonus figures and other details. However, we are investigating the starting salary and will come up with measures to deal with and correct this, if necessary.
The anonymous comments by their nature are able to be much more critical than any balanced news article ever can be. Part of the reason these go up largely unmoderated is so that there can be transparency about news and things that are wrong can be highlighted by readers.
Hopefully, they also help in bringing out the truth through reasoned debate.
However, I disagree that we only ever run positive stories - we regularly publish a number of stories that point out difficulties in firms or other organisations when there is sufficient evidence for it.
Partly, negative stories also take much more time to fully research and stand-up and we are currently somewhat short-staffed with the volume of news that is coming out of law firms.
I would love to be able to take on a larger team, of course to be able to do proper investigative reporting, but with "enrichment" as you put it still expectedly a long, long time away, we have to do the best we can with the current resources.
In any case, our mission and aims remain unchanged to what they were when we first started less than a year ago.
http://www.legallyindia.com/legally-india-all-news-about-the-indian-legal-market
Do keep letting me know your thoughts and please bear with us during any teething problems we experience.
Best regards,
Kian
Now that you tell me it was not, you are right and will be appropriately penalised in the competition. :-)
Kian
ps: For the avoidance of doubt, I was kidding...
Maybe some others...
But be creative if you really want to use smileys in good old fashioned text-only - they look much prettier anyway, IMHO.
Although in blogging (or in any writing), if something is well written there should not be a need for smileys to clarify the meaning or intent. Just my old-fashioned two-cents.
:-)
Kian
I also hope to be able to do a round-up of blogging action so far, elaborate on some more criteria, and outline new prize categories.
Unfortunately I have been travelling for the past three weeks so have fallen a little behind but will get to it ASAP.
Happy blogging,
Kian
Please respond on the forum thread below (not in this thread please, as it is a little off topic)
http://www.legallyindia.com/Comments-how-to-moderate-them#630
Best,
Kian
Kian
However, Narendra Modi has very little to do with mooting and I don't think it would be in anyone's interest if the thread to this story turned into a back-and-forth on a topic this divisive that has nothing to do with mooting.
By all means, if it is an issue of concern, please feel free to write a blog or post on our forum about it, where a proper debate can be had on the topic.
Best regards,
Kian
http://www.legallyindia.com/images/stories/docs/Balaji-writ-petition.txt
We can not confirm at present whether this is an accurate and final version of the petition but understand that it is close to the version which is being served on the respondents.
Best regards,
Kian
I agree that developing market would be interesting, but there is also less data available in many others. China's legal market anecdotally has had huge growth and practices, many of which are from international firms...
Best regards
Kian
In response to your queries, we only write about reports when there is some interesting news or data in it that is worth writing about.
The associate engagement survey - again, apologies for the delay. It really should be around the corner now, at least the first part. It's one of those things that always slips or some news breaks and it gets pushed aside. Completely unacceptable, I agree, was going to have it done this week...
Best,
Kian
We will cover the findings of the RSG report in more detail soon.
One reason we do not cover awards is partly because there is such a large number of rankings, reports and awards that it is very difficult to draw the line at which is worth covering and which is not - we get a good number of emails from award organisers asking for coverage.
Second, the majority of awards, rankings and awards are not very good. For Legally India to report that Award X has decided that Y is the best law firm in India is a little meaningless.
Each Award has its own methodology and credibility and some are better than others, which is hard to evaluate without being part of the judging process.
Also, personally I feel that most established law firm rankings and awards are just not very interesting or enlightening.
I hope that kind of content is not too sorely missed but please let me know if you really want to read about it and will consider.
Best regards,
Kian
Thanks, Kian
No problem about criticism at all. I actually think it's great that I get to hear these things and find out which stories readers enjoy and which they don't.
It is a rare privilege in publishing to get instant feedback so please, feel free to criticise absolutely anytime, will always be welcome! Debate is good.
Best wishes,
Kian
First of all, apologies for the late response as I am currently travelling.
@29 and others- I do disagree somewhat. I wrote in my original comment that this "sheds light on" the firm's expansion strategies, which it does.
If a firm decides to expand in its existing office by taking on a lease of another floor, that is certainly evidence of a strategy of some sort and you can bet that senior partners will have discussed this before deciding on it. Property is a large part of their fixed cost for most law firms.
The alternative could have been to say, we are fine with existing space and size in Delhi and would prefer to focus on other offices or cities.
But in a sense what constitutes "expansion strategy" and what does not is a fine line and I agree that there could be valid criticism of the term I used in my original comment.
Best regards,
Kian
Selecting winners will also not just be in my hands... We'll come up with a good process in due course.
Thanks,
Kian