Rainmaker
The Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra has sent a letter to Legally India and 147 other recipients, including journalists, the President and Prime Minister of India, all Supreme Court judges and high court judges and others.
The BCI’s 2012 meeting minutes regarding the All India Bar Exam (AIBE) have revealed details of the process by which the contract to conduct the fourth and subsequent AIBEs was awarded to ITeS Horizon.
Two years after Thomson Reuters bought legal process outsourcing (LPO) company Pangea3, a managing director who's been with the company for seven years, Antony Alex, has joined legal industry services provider Rainmaker.
Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra revealed in an interview with legal website Bar & Bench today that its All India Bar Exam (AIBE) contractor ITES Horizon could get paid up to Rs 2.1 crore ($378,000) for assisting with the exam, while parts of BCI revenues from the exam would go to the welfare of lawyers.
He added that the BCI would not provide any study materials this time and would release model questions three or four days before the exam on 9 December.
A Right to Information (RTI) request has revealed that the Bar Council of India (BCI) entered into a wide-ranging letter of intent (LOI) with legal industry services provider Rainmaker in 2010, not just to conduct the All India Bar Exam (AIBE) but also to cross-promote other products of the company. However, according to Rainmaker, the majority of that LOI was never implemented.
Exclusive: The Bar Council of India (BCI) reconfirmed that the fourth All India Bar Examination (AIBE) will be held on 25 November with no chances of postponement. The council will conduct the exam internally and has hired Noida-based IT implementation and delivery company ITES Horizons for additional help, because none of the tendering third party agencies to conduct the exam could be finalised.
Breaking: The next All India Bar Exam (AIBE) would be held on 25 November 2012, announced the Bar Council of India (BCI) today.
Claiming that law graduates in some states are practising without passing the All India Bar Exam (AIBE), the Bar Council of India (BCI) said today it would permanently bar graduates from practice who do not pass within three attempts and 18 months, and assign unique identification numbers for all law students.
Exclusive: The Bar Council of India (BCI) has again declined to disclose detailed information in respect of its contract with the company running the postponed all-India bar exam, following an appeal to an earlier right to information (RTI) request.
However, the BCI has now reversed its response to the original RTI and claimed that it did in fact solicit tenders from competing service providers - Tata Consultancy Services, Sify and Imaging Solutions - before it awarded the contract to Rainmaker.
Responding to a Right to Information (RTI) Act request by a Nalsar graduate, the Bar Council of India (BCI) did not disclose the fees that would be paid to legal industry service provider Rainmaker in connection with conducting the all India bar exam while admitting that it did not actively look for any other suitable providers.
Indra Prasth
Bar Council Of India which had earlier outsourced its website development and administration of the Bar Exam to Rain Maker has now said that Rain Maker will take care of everything including cleanliness and discipline of all the Bars.
Rain Maker’s new website has now sections on ‘Legal Cleanliness: Hunting Dirt Like Legal Eagles’ and on discipline ‘Legal Beagles: Bar’s Guard Dogs’.
Explaining the logic as to why it engaged Rain Maker only Mr. Barrier of BCI said, “We don’t expect a good monsoon this time round. Since our farmers are very poor and down trodden we thought that someone with as good a name as Rain Maker would be able to help their cause”.
“You see, we lawyers are in this noble profession have the feeling of ‘doing good for all’. By making sure that we engage Rain Maker for everything we hope that our Rain Gods too will be inspired by this act of legal fraternity and help our farmers”, he said.
“We are undisciplined, unclean and maybe incompetent too. But we lawyers do believe in helping the farmers gain employment and earn money good enough for a good life. This will reduce economic disparity”, he added.
Junior Lawyers in the country don’t get paid anything by their senior lawyers as there are no rules on Juniorship while a lawyer in a law firm earns on an average 6 lacs per annum. Maybe, the BCI needs to introspect on economic disparity in its own house. But the BCI seems intent on looking outside at the clouds and of course, Rain Maker.
Kitkit Lactose of Rain Maker said on legal cleanliness, “We are planning to introduce some high tech jhadoos in the district courts and discuss implementation strategies and delivery systems with the munsifs there”. “Though, we’ll first have to go ourselves and see how district courts look from inside. Wonder if they are air-conditioned”, he added.
Rain Maker has also created a wonderful website www.bardiscipline.org which has virtues of discipline and some useless details in beautiful font and bullet points. Even the colours are striking. But that is about it. Otherwise, the website is all the same.
“Rain Maker excels in content delivery ermm that is what our website reads and ermm I personally have created the content on ‘discipline’ of www.bardiscipline.org”, said Vivek, an intern at Rainmaker as they don’t have many regular employees there.
The intern is on a 6 month internship as he has been suspended for an entire semester by his college on disciplinary grounds. “We are sure we will be able to pull this off. It is raining very hard [in cash] even for a Rain Maker”, said another intern, who is the most experienced chap among the present employees at Rainmaker.
“Only Indra Deva can save us from Rain Maker”, said Nandi, who is a devout of Lord Shiva, the God of destruction.
FNWB news network would like to hear from the readers whether they think such outsourcing models are good or not.
The Bar Council of India (BCI) has announced that it will carry out its all-India bar exam in association with legal market services provider Rainmaker as a multiple choice test of 100 questions on 5 December 2010 that will require a "basic amount of preparation" to pass, although the BCI admitted that graduating students would probably not be able to practice in courts until 31 December.
Legal market services provider Rainmaker will run the proposed bar exam for the Bar Council of India (BCI) as the BCI is set to unveil its new website at 1pm today which was set up by the company.
Two thirds of lawyers think a lockstep partnership model is the correct long-term model for a law firm but only one third of equity partners share that view, according to the 2009 law firm survey by legal sector services provider Rainmaker.
Amarchand Mangaldas Delhi's former joint chief financial officer (CFO) and chief operating officer (COO) Bithika Anand has joined legal market services provider Rainmaker as founding director of a new business venture.
Law schools, law firms and law-related businesses are mushrooming all over the place these days as India does one of the things it does best: building enterprises.
A new university course offering a qualification in legal process outsourcing (LPO) has been launched in a barrage of acronyms.
The course is a joint venture between Indian legal training providers/recruiters Rainmaker and the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) School of Law.
The Rs.18,000 one-year on-line taught course is snappily entitled P.G.D.L.P.O. (or Post-Graduate Diploma in Legal Process Outsourcing, to give it its full name).
According to a press release published on LPO blog Legally Yours, the syllabus will cover: "Professional English Proficiency (“PEP”), Virtual Intelligence Methods (“VIM”), Legal Education and Proficiency (“LEAP”), Skills, Personal Effectiveness and Enterprise Development (“SPEED”)".
Catchy! (even though VIM's long-form is slightly confusing).
Apparently, according to the press release, 500 students have applied already for the first semester and the University is going to roll out a second intake in August to meet demand.
This programme could very well catch on and it could also be something that LPO providers facing high staff attrition have been clamouring for.
The main question will be whether law graduates will really be up for spending another year studying and losing themselves in an acronym jungle.
Photo by vlima.com