What skills does a good lawyer need?
Amarchand will welcome a new partner next week who comes with private equity in-house experience and a recently completed MBA.
So should an MBA perhaps be the new LLM? For the last two weeks a debate has been raging on Legally India's forums about the value of domestic post-graduate degrees in law.
It is a commonly held view in educational circles that Indian LLMs are not as good as they could be, particularly when stacked against academic offerings overseas.
This does not and should not reflect on those with domestic LLM degrees but should act as a call for an open debate on how to further modernise India's law schools.
We have interviewed India's "living legend of law" Professor Madhava Menon and asked him where he thinks Indian legal education should go in the future.
Students will surely play major roles, as it is their initiatives and hands-on involvement that have arguably been one of the main reasons top Indian law schools have become so successful and will continue to be so.
ILS Pune students last week started up a "corporate cell" to foster corporate law awareness and job prospects.
In Professor Menon's words, India's legal future is very bright.
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For law firms success is most often measured by growth and deals.
Start-up firms Atman and Salvus are working on a full merger, Seth Dua is expanding in litigation and Luthra & Luthra has snapped up another eight students from campus.
On the fee-earning front:
- Kochhar and AZB have advised on the creation of the new Bloomberg-UTV business channel,
- Freshfields, JSA and Luthra sold BP's Indian windfarm business,
- Amarchand, JSA and Mallesons have been working on India's largest ever infrastructure fund to date,
- Khaitan & Co is loving doing deals in Sri Lanka, and
- in Kolkata, Khaitan & Partners has helped to get Jet Airways pilots flying again with a strategic criminal case.
Our latest Legal Opinion analyses the Indian 3G spectrum auction process and its vagaries.
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The cartel thing is also mentioned in Wikipedia page of NLSIU bangalore in last paragraph. So its quite evident. Recently, IITs are also in fray to start law schools. Once they take off, then it will be very tedious task for NLU to protect these cartels as IITians are known entrepreneurs. They will give NLU a run for their money for sure..
The only IIT that has established an institute of law is IIT Kharagpur and that too specifically for IPR. Besides, one needs to keep in mind the fact that networking and 'client- firm (partner) relationship' determine (to a great extent) the success of a law firm. For these two reasons, IIT law graduates giving NLU graduates a 'run for their money' is not likely to happen.
I have followed this site and all the comments to each of the articles/ posts, since its inception and have been a silent spectator taking in all the various view points. One issue that has got caught in the cross hairs of many posts is the NLUs vs non NLU colleges. To me this is a tad disturbing. Let’s get one thing straight, there is no checklist that one can tick off to say that “x” person is a great lawyer. It takes different skill sets to make a good lawyer and a synthesis of skill sets to grow a team.
For all the NLU graduates thinking that they are the cat’s whiskers and that by simply getting into an NLU by passing a test they have the sole right to brag that they are better than the rest – answer me this, did any of the senior partners of the big firms (im not taking names) graduate from an NLU??? These are the people that assess your skills and pay your salaries!
And for those from the non-NLU colleges, get a life and stop complaining. End of the day everyone has to work their ass off and deliver results.
While I have seen that a fresh NLU graduate is easier to deploy (if I may use the term:-)) on the field, seldom do all of them make good team leaders. The difficulty is in making a person unlearn a certain line of thought and re-learn a different method. On the other hand, I have found that non-NLU students to be more receptive to ideas. One needs to learn to adapt .Also to grow as a team, you have to learn to combine various skill sets, which may necessarily require that ppl from various universities to put their heads together and get the desired result.
My views on the above are based on my experience of managing a mid-sized all practice law firm. For those interested, I may have graduated from NLSIU or from any other college.
Best regards
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