In today’s edition of Mint: The Indian lawyers’ pie may be large but taking the first nibble is often the hardest part.

In today’s edition of Mint: On the face of it, my mission was the simplest of tasks possible within the legal system: to get an affidavit. I needed the sworn document proving my identity and address to sign up for a Bharatgas connection. In going the sworn path, I also went against the well-meaning advice of those who told me that getting a gas cylinder from the grey market was easier.

Either the Bar Council of India (BCI) should censure dozens of law firms for their singing and dancing websites, or it needs to be realistic and relax its strict advertising restrictions, argues Raghul Sudheesh.

In today’s edition of Mint: The success story of the NLU model has been spun mainly around two factors: the impressive employment statistics and enormous salaries offered to students from top NLUs and the ability of few alumni to gain admission to the world’s top law school, argue Anup Surendranath and Chinmayi Arun.

Everyone’s talking about the cat that accidentally got out of the bag. Private screenings of a video featuring two people are being organised around town.

Reviews have been not been flattering. The video “deserves a PG-13 rating”, says one who saw it. “It’s a bit like a bad Hindi movie which usually shields anything remotely sexual with a flower or some such inane object.”

Mint legal correspondent Nikhil Kanekal argues in today’s legal page in the paper that the hearing the Supreme Court is waging against the media, is fundamentally unfair and misunderstands the trade of journalism, as lawyers and judges are often wont to.

Mint column: Lawyers should be the noble and independent servants of justice, the courts and their clients. Finding lawyers who do all three of those things is the exception, rather than the rule.

For starters, Indian clients have very little, if any, recourse against lawyers who give them bad, negligent or harmful legal advice, as explained in today’s Mint feature. But that is just the tip of lawyers’ legal immunity iceberg.

A corollary of the Rule of Law is that legislation with retrospective effect is highly dubious, argues Kian Ganz. The latest budget proposals to tax offshore transactions going back to 1962, is a worrying sign of the kind of country India wants to be.

Mint’s Nikhil Kanekal argues in today’s edition of Mint that the Bar Council of India (BCI) should be stripped of most of its powers and replaced with an independent regulators who can better oversee legal education and the noble profession.

Press Council of India (PCI) chairman Justice Markandey Katju issued a press release today with his latest essay on the sensible limits of freedom of speech in an India only “partially emerged from the dark, feudal age”, Salman Rushdie’s prose, the Jaipur Literature Festival and why no one cares about Nobel prize winners.

Netizens world wide ‘celebrated’ today, with websites such as Wikipedia taking their content offline as a mark of protest against the tabling of the potentially draconian US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Google, whose doodles usually denote a birthday or other notable day of feast, replaced its logo with a black square for US users. But what’s the fuss about? We have long had it as bad if not worse in India.

JSA partner Lalit Kumar glances back through 2011, the year that was dominated by the Anna Hazare campaign, via his lens of the most important reforms and changes in corporate laws.

The capital gains tax liability imposed on AT&T in the infamous Idea Callular case were caused by an avoidable drafting error and incorrect structuring, argues Naveen Goel.

J Sagar Associates (JSA) associate Leena Levakumar offers a jurisprudential history of competition law.

Hitesh Sanghvi discusses the safeguards that need to be followed to preserve subrogation rights of Export Credit Agencies (ECA) in External Commercial Borrowing (ECBs) transactions.

J Sagar Associates’ (JSA) regulatory and policy practice argues that one of the lessons to take away from last year’s Commonwealth Games in Delhi, is that Private Public Partnerships (PPP) are the future of Indian sports.