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:
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Do you mean a bookmark-ish feature, so it is easy to find / follow favourited comments again in future?
>is there any possibility of LI introducing a feature where users can 'star' important comments?
The fact that cultural mores have changed is a normal part of societies' evolution, much like many TV shows from the 80s, 70s or 60s are for the most part rather tone deaf and full of sexist tropes that are not as funny anymore (and maybe never really were either).
That said, Friends is still a great show that still holds up in many parts (or maybe that's just nostalgia).
But the 'bioweapon' theory that Covid was intentionally released remains a conspiracy theory, and the 'accidentally escaped from a lab' theory is also just that at present, a theory.
But yes, more impartial investigations of its origins should happen. Will they? Probably not any time soon.
Or with regard to crypto, do not trust even most non-anonymous people: whoever says they 100% know what will happen to crypto over the next 12 months is lying.
So, some good baseline advice might be:
1. If you have to ask, don't do it.
2. Don't ever invest anything (especially in crypto) that you're not ok theoretically losing 100% of (for more reasons than purely the price fluctuations in crypto).
3. If you're looking at crypto as an alternative to Fixed Deposits, don't do it.
4. Understand that with crypto, you are basically gambling: it is not a safe investment by a long stretch, even though it might be getting lots of publicity right now. So unless you understand the crypto markets and technology and unless you're ok to gamble, don't do it.
5. If you still want to go ahead and do it, good luck :)
End of the day, there is plenty of space for everyone in the legal market and we are not intent on competing with B&B or LiveLaw, which have both done incredibly well in their own ways. LI, however, has always been a bit more scrappy and much more happy to carve out our own niche by doing our own thing(s) in our own way(s).
B&B and LiveLaw almost certainly have more traffic than LI these days but they obviously have very different core audiences, targeting the much larger pan-India population of advocates and also non-lawyers / news hounds with breaking court reports (effectively directly competing with / complementing coverage of national newspapers and TV stations on that beat, which is a much larger pie).
LI doesn't do that and we decided a while ago that going for court reports and competing for numbers in that space was not for us for a variety of reasons. Instead LI aims to cover the things no-one else covers, and we hope we can cover these differently, better and (usually) earlier than anyone else. We also hope that provides unique value, transparency, discussion and also sometimes a bit of entertainment in these sometime dark days to our core readership.
So do we believe are our core readers? Primarily Indian and foreign corporate lawyers, as well as law students, aspirants academics and other lawyers with an interest in legal careers, institutions and organisations. However, we will hopefully keep evolving and changing with the times and the preferences of readers, so if we've left you out of the above list and have ideas for what we should cover, improve or change, please let us know, we are always listening.
Lots of Love,
LI
On a similar note, we understand that funds partner Shagoofa Khan is also currently on a sabbatical.
The comment regarding the CPIM appears to be mostly political propaganda based on unverified information from 60 years ago: https://www.freepressjournal.in/india/chinas-chairman-is-our-chairman-why-china-will-forever-haunt-cpim
Other 'proof' about original claims appears to rely primarily on a website that regularly publishes unverified information, and in this case the article linked to in support is not a bona fide report but clear misrepresentation and distortions of what was actually said in the video and its intent.
Regarding the TN-related claim, prima facie OP's evidence is not sufficient to claim that all Tamil Nadu based parties ending with a K meet the OP's allegation.
End of the day, we welcome political debate on LI but obvious political propaganda or fake news that is not verifiable, factual or relies on questionable sources or uses language or arguments that are obviously in bad faith will be moderated.
Also, the illusion that vloggers or influencers do no work is probably not true in most cases (unless they're already famous from the start or just become an overnight sensation). Especially when starting out, some of the most successful ones would have been working way harder than most corporate lawyers, plus have things that you can't necessarily learn, like a certain 'look', talent, performance abilities, video editing, huge amount of drive, some ego, and so on...
From that perspective, corporate law might have better and safer odds of making you good money (at least once you've been able to get into a good law school and your foot in the profession, which obviously requires a lot of privilege).
This will be an unpopular opinion, but the main reason law firms like hiring NLU grads is because it is easy for them to do so. You hire from the top few NLUs and the odds that most interviewees are smart enough to work in law firms (due to CLAT), the baseline teaching and legal knowledge is good enough, the competitive crucible of a residential NLU can give students good work and extracurricular experience, and finally, RCCs often already do a lot of pre-selection, and finally, Days Zero are a really efficient and cost-effective way of hiring many low-risk candidates in one go.
We'll show ourselves out now... 😊
Even if it turns out not to be a career for you at the end of the day, learning a language is always useful and might open up other opportunities in future and will simply help you sharpen your minds and improve your English and other skills also.
There are lots of great resources online for learning languages and many are free also. A really great app that's well taught and would be worth a go might be this one: https://www.languagetransfer.org/
There are also better known options like DuoLingo and Memrise (which are a bit more for vocab) and lots of YouTube conversational videos and also some cheap paid-for options.
Some semi up-to-date figures on partnership size (and sometimes fee-earners) at least are available in our database, by which the ranking is somewhat different, depending on how you count (Khaitan is largest by partner size, for instance):
https://www.legallyindia.com/db/
If anyone has any corrections or figures for other firms, please do share these below.
We are considering overhauling the way threads are moderated and involving the community more in that, though it may be hard arriving at a consensus about exactly where to draw the line, so feedback on the above is much appreciated.
Some of this may also be solved by allowing readers to completely hide conversations about certain topics, such as Covid bioweapons, though to be honest some of the responses and the like in that comment are also fairly amusing and harmless if they are moderated strictly and fake news, propaganda or conspiracy theories are weeded out somewhat...
Reader opinions on this are very welcome.
https://www.legallyindia.com/law-firms/jsa-grows-sports-media-with-vidhii-nandini-mehta-20130415-3595
https://www.legallyindia.com/law-firms/ashurst-bestie-ilp-hires-2nd-mumbai-partner-with-sports-lawyer-kiran-desai-20160720-7852
https://www.legallyindia.com/law-firms/tmt-re-absorbs-half-of-sports-law-start-up-ludus-ludus-re-launches-as-krida-20160323-7341
Many in the Thinkpad X1 series (4th generation and up generally great) are some of the nicest, thinnest and lightest laptops money can buy and you're going to love, if you can find them, and can go from Rs 30,000 to Rs 45,000 or more (new they often cost between Rs 1 to Rs 1.5 lakh).
Slightly cheaper are the X250 series or thereabouts (like X240 or X260 - bigger numbers are usually newer and better), which have a smaller screen than the X1 but are still very light and have long battery lives. Very popular for business users.
Then you have the cheaper and less elegant & chunkier T series (T440, T450 or higher models are new enough - do a bit of googling on the exact model and whether it works for you). They have solid battery life and can be had for as little as Rs 20,000 or less sometimes, depending on how old a model you're getting. They are nearly endlessly repairable and upgradeable and will get the job done.
Whatever laptop you get, try to make sure you get at least 8GB of RAM if possible (though this can also in some models be upgraded by your electronics shop expert for not much money) and an SSD hard drive (which most modern laptops have).
If you're buying new there are lots of entry-level options, though the build quality likely won't be as good as even an old Thinkpad but would be interested in other readers' suggestions and favourite brands and specs...
[The comment appeared to have been swallowed up or did not get posted due to network issues, no moderation was intended.]
I agree that trolls can derail discussions pointlessly, though sometimes they can also be amusing or lead to enlightening discussions (usually unintentionally). Our pro-active flagging such trollish content and making it less visible might discourage such derailing, without requiring a response from non-troll readers.
To get an idea of what readers / commenters would prefer, a quick straw poll:
1. Please like this comment if you feel that moderation of trolls is currently mostly acceptable / on the right path.
2. Please dislike this comment if you would like to see much more aggressive moderation / more hiding and demotion of trollish content.
If you have any other thoughts on moderation, please do respond to this comment.
End of the day, we needed to pick some iconography since the texts 'like' and 'object' made the page inordinately busy. If you have any suggestions for good icons, please let us know.
Here are some possible directions like could take: ⭐ - quite nice but also denotes 'favouriting' something so maybe confusing
👍 - very easy to understand but very Facebooky and boring
😎 - could be fun but maybe confusing?
Regarding dislike, any thoughts on the following potentially, using a gavel to indicate objections?
One of the core experiments behind LI conversations is also that there is a value in exposing fake news, by also (at times) publishing misleading or trollish posts, if:
1. they appear to reflect a genuinely and widely held belief, and
2. provided that it they published with suitable health warnings, and
3. can and will be disputed and disproven on their merits in the comment threads.
Do let us know if you have any thoughts on this though, the conversations systems are in the process of evolving.
Overall, if you speak to women in most professions honestly, a lot will have stories about sexual harassment (if you don't just include physical harassment, but also verbal or other behavioural or institutional harassment). The 47% figure of sexual harassment from that survey actually seems fairly realistic, and also tallies up with a lot of research elsewhere (52% in [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/10/almost-all-young-women-in-the-uk-have-been-sexually-harassed-survey-finds the workplace in the UK], for instance).
And even if for hypothetical argument's sake the number were half that, it'd still be a huge figure of millions of women.
On the other hand, there is plenty of supporting evidence that the vast majority of sexual harassment (and also sex crimes) are never reported. In a survey, 47% of women in India reported having faced sex harassment at work but only half ever file a complaint, and 70% are not happy with the outcome of such a complaint: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/workplace-safety-still-an-issue-survey/article31011136.ece
The reality is that a large number of companies (and probably Indian law firms too), sweep complaints under the carpet or simply issue a warning to the perpetrator (especially if the person is a senior member who generates a lot of business). And most complaints do not automatically result in placing the alleged perpetrator on leave, but require a bit of due diligence to ensure that the complaint is prima facie credible (and a lot of complaints never make it past the internal complaints committee stage). If there is strong prima facie evidence against someone, there is also legal liability on the company or firm for not putting the accused on leave.
Please also cite evidence when you say "nothing happens to the lady" in a false complaint. The opposite is true: many sacrifice their career by making legitimate complaints (particularly if against someone more powerful in the organisation), and might lose their jobs or promotion opportunities or experience retaliation for complaining, even if the ICC recognises the complaint. Now imagine the professional and workplace repercussions if a complaint is actually proven false, and if the person she (wrongly) accused remains her manager, etc.
Fact is, women usually have very little to gain by making an ICC complaint other than risk to their career, and in the rare cases they are successful, (possibly minor) punishment for their harasser. On the other hand, they have a lot to lose as the process is also stacked against accusers.
In this case, the LI conversation had not ever named the faculty member. The Instagram video referred to had been very widely shared already and the GNLU student body and administration were clearly aware. It was also clear that the recording was not manufactured (though in cases like these it is also obvious that the video can never be the complete story either).
The intention behind hosting discussions such as these is therefore to give oxygen to these kinds of issues and to allow for them to be debated on the basis of their respective merits. There have certainly been some very well-thought-out and balanced responses in this thread alone that have been quite elucidating and interesting.
And some of the responses will hopefully also create more empathy from students for teachers, many of whom are having as hard a time as students or anyone else in this pandemic.
At the same time, we would hope that it would also raise further awareness with faculty and administrations about the struggles students are facing. Most faculty will be aware, but in stressful times such as these, accidents or miscommunication can also happen, and it is certain that these kinds of incidents are not isolated or limited to GNLU either.
1. This discussion does not name any faculty member, and the link to the Instagram post, which had been widely shared and read and that included the name of the faculty member, had been redacted upon request on LI.
2. The discussion also raises a legitimate issue common at a lot of law schools (and also workplaces) at the moment on how to deal sensitively with pandemic-related issues, including extensions, bereavements, etc.
3. As far as we understand, there is no dispute as the fact that the things alleged to have been said were in fact said.
4. There appears to be a public interest in this kind of discussion being had.
If you disagree with the decision, please let us know with specific reasons for why this discussion is not valuable and should be removed.
>There’s a good chance most of the problems in your life and work come down to insufficient slack. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it.
All emojis actually work in comments, as of a few months ago, but you'd need to either use your phone keyboard or your Windows/Mac insert emoji-type tools to do so. Would people prefer a button in the chatbox itself that allows selecting emojis (similar to Telegram/WhatsApp, etc)?
If you have any feedback or suggestion about where the buttons might be better placed, please let us know in this thread.
There is also the option of disabling the "Object" button completely and just having a single button. If this is something that you think is a good idea, please do let us know.