Mint

Madhava Menon’s national law school experiment of 1986 may have failed to pull hundreds of Indian law schools out of mediocrity but it has brought newfound respect to legal education, reports Mint today. Critics complain that the national law schools have mostly benefited corporate law but this may not be their fault. While no NLS grads have so far made it to senior counsel rank, some are making their mark in litigation.

Exclusive in today’s Mint: Revealing two years of research, over 20 interviews with current and former lawyers, and never-read-before insider details and accounts, read the most definitive and balanced account published so far of Fox Mandal Delhi’s financial woes and how the merger between Fox and Little & Co Mumbai unravelled. 

Legally India’s last Mint column in 2011 gives its verdict on some of the past year’s biggest stories related to corporate law firms, with an unashamed slant bias towards UK-Indo relations. Click here to read more.

The Legally India newsletter has been absent for a little while but things have been busy at India Legal Inc, and at Legally India towers.

Mint legal correspondent Nikhil Kanekal has surveyed leading Supreme Court counsel to compile a list of the year’s most impact-heavy cases heard by the apex court. Have your say and share your views.

Mint exclusive: The Bar Council of Delhi chairman Rakesh Tiku sent a letter to law firms such as Khaitan & Co in Delhi, which have converted into a limited liability partnerships (LLPs), warning them that this could be professional misconduct.

Delhi bar council member and Luthra & Luthra partner Vijay Sondhi responded with a letter of his own, slamming Tiku’s warning as illegal, and one Delhi law firm mothballed its LLP firm to avoid the controversy.

Mint exclusive: Mumbai solicitors’ firm Wadia Ghandy has opened up in Singapore, with three of its partners having secured licences to practise Indian law in the island nation.

Mint has summarised the revolutionary case pendency stats prepared by the Supreme Court in a concise chart, while Legally India asked two academics researching case pendency for comment on Kapadia’s Law Day speech and the new figures.

Mint - easily India’s best quality business daily - will now feature cutting-edge legal industry news and analysis in its pages every second Friday under an exclusive new content partnership with Legally India.

In today’s Mint edition, Legally India editor Kian Ganz’s colum demystifies India’s legal market: Despite India’s fairly average legal population density every lawyer here has to make do with only $1.4m of GDP. This, it turns out, is the lowest figure in both developed and developing legal markets. Click here to read the column on this, pseudo lawyers and more.

Please comment below or on Mint with suggestions for future topics or stories worth covering.

Also in today’s Mint: all-new research on salary progression at law firms, as well as how and why law firm salaries have risen so much in the last five years.

Law firms pay lawyers with six years of experience up to around Rs 30 lakh per annum in Mumbai, revealed analysis of data collected in Legally India’s associate survey, as first published in Mint today.

Another week, another law school ranking: national daily Mint has ranked the large national law colleges in the top five positions, in its India's best colleges supplement it published today.

Mint has placed National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore in first, closely followed by Nalsar University of Law, Hyderabad and National University of Juridicial Sciences, Kolkata (NUJS).

The schools in the top three positions were unchanged since last year, and achieved 637, 627 and 619 points respectively in the rankings.

The runners up in fourth and fifth were National Law University, Jodhpur and National Law Institute University, Bhopal, which swapped places from their positions last year.

Mint's methodology used a combination of the rankings used by India Today magazine and Outlook magazine last week. Mint contacted faculty members and legal professionals with a questionnaire, asking them to rate each of intellectual capital, pedagogic systems and processes, placements, and "infrastructure and support systems".

Each category was weighted with intellectual capital being allocated 250 points down to infrastructure and support systems, which was worth 150 points.

The paper did not publish the sample size used.

Faculty of Law Delhi University came sixth; Government Law College, Mumbai jumped up the rankings to seventh; ILS Law College, Pune was unchanged at eight; Amity Law School, Delhi made it into the top ten for the first time at nine; and Symbiosis Law School, Pune closed the list at ten.

Click here for a PDF of the full ranking on livemint.com.

Have a look at India Today's and Outlook India's competing law school rankings, which excited heated debate from readers last week.

For anyone fascinated by intellectual property in India, there was an interview in last weekend's Mint Lounge supplement with IP expert Pravin Anand, managing partner of Anand and Anand.

Anand is portrayed as an unashamed IP geek who has not only put on an IP-themed educational play and created an IP-themed boardgame, but who has also been at the forefront of Indian IP development.

In one current high-profile case he is representing toy-maker and Scrabble-copyright owner Mattel against the creators of the Facebook/internet sensation Scrabulous, which has since been renamed Lexulous - for IP reasons, obviously.

In what is either amazing editorial foresight or an intriguing coincidence, the young Kolkota entrepreneurs who are facing Anand in court about Scrabulous, were profiled in the same paper just a few pages away.

Problem is, each interview makes its respective subjects sound so similarly charming, for the reader it becomes difficult to pick a side in the case.