We have just witnessed a live demonstration that the National Law Aptitude Test (NLAT), the online home-proctored admissions test announced eight days ago by NLSIU Bangalore that has taken place today, is impossible to conduct without significant risk of cheating.

Facing heavy internal resistance after suggesting that staff should return from their hometowns where many had sheltered during the Covid-19 lockdowns, Lakshmikumaran & Sridharan (LKS) has changed course and scrapped the policy tonight, announcing it would continue working from home indefinitely.

In part, the firm has cited stronger billings than expected, though this doesn’t mean law firms are out of the woods.*

L&L Partners corporate transactional advisory partnership has paid out bonuses to fee-earners just a little behind schedule last week, though it notified its 44 fresh campus recruits that they would not be able to join the firm before 2021 as opposed to around this month (though a few of these have since joined - see update below).

AZB & Partners Mumbai-based financial services partner Anu Tiwari is leaving the firm.

NLSIU Bangalore has decided to conduct separate admissions to its BA, LLB and LLM programmes this year, outside the oft-postponed Common Law Admission Test (CLAT), on 12 September 2020 with a week for applicants to register for 4% of the fees of the CLAT.

Khaitan & Co has moved into a managed offices in Bengaluru operated by its client WeWork, with a seating capacity of 150, which is nearly double its current local headcount; in the National Capital Region (NCR) it has relocated to a state-of-the-art but more traditional office space in Noida from Delhi.

Scoop: This latest postponement will now push the CLAT nearly to October

Economic Laws Practice (ELP) equity partner Darshan Upadhyay and partners Shyam Pandya, Amit Manubarwala and Bhavin Gada, have started up a specialist corporate firm called Stratage Law Partners.

Lakshmikumaran & Sridharan (LKS) has hired Amritha Salian, who had been an associate partner at Themis Associates in Bangalore until June 2019, and Gaurav Dayal, who had been Gurgaon-based associate general counsel at the Oyo hotels group.

Exclusive: The CLAT had last week been postponed indefinitely though now has a tentative date again, less than one month away*

IndusLaw has ramped up its Mumbai corporate offering significantly with the hire of two from Algo Legal who are due to join: partner Siddharth Manchanda and associate partner Minhaz Lokhandwala.

Amit Jajoo (Mumbai; commercial litigation),Avik Biswas (Bengaluru; employment law, anti-bribery and anti-corruption),Lomesh Kiran Nidumuri (Bengaluru; civl and commercial disputes),Manan Lahoty (Mumbai; capital markets),Manish Gupta (Delhi, M&A, private equity),Mayank Mishra (Delhi; disputes),Nishant Singh (Mumbai; M&A, private equity, banking & finance, corporate) andSaurav Kumar (Delhi, M&A, private equity, corporate).

Sometimes doing what is normal is abnormal, especially so in the days of the coronavirus on the loose.

Reports and attempts have surfaced of how easy it had been to apparently circumvent some of the security measures in place for the home-proctored Symbiosis Law Admissions Test (SLAT), which was taken by around 20,000 aspirants this year for its five-year BA, BBA, LLB and LLB Honours programmes, according to an official with Symbiosis.

Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas has promoted 10 to salaried partner level, as first reported Bar & Bench.

NLUJAA Guwahati vice-chancellor (VC) Prof JS Patil has gone on leave pending the resolution of the sexual harassment allegations against him in an FIR filed by his neighbours.

Algo Legal Gurgaon-based partner Vinayak Mishra has yesterday joined venture capital (VC) fund Lightspeed India Partners Advisors as its first de facto legal head for India and South-East Asia.

Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas (CAM) has postponed fresher joining dates all the way until next year, according to emails sent by the firm to candidates most of whom had accepted offers in 2019 to join the firm in August 2020.

Khaitan & Co has made working-from-home from a distance the default until the end of 2020, bearing in mind a variety of factors and routines upended by the Covid-19 pandemic.