1. You need to bill double than what your team is paid.

2. No such thing as connections in partnership. Only pure merit.

3. Mid levels move out because they cannot handle the work pressure not because they are denied partnership. If you have been excellent at servicing clients, then you are guaranteed a seat at the table. In house is utterly useless and I would suggest not even going down this path, unless you want to sink your own career.

4. There are broadly equity and salaried partner models. If you're equity, you get a share in the business.

I am surprised your partner hasn’t spoken to you about this.

Depending upon the firm, salaried partners (10-12 PQE) may or may not be required to bring in work. It depends on whether their equity partner is a big or mid rainmaker. If it is the latter, then minimum expectations are you bring in revenue that covers your own small team’s cost (inclusive of bonuses) along with a 30% overheads cost. Ideally in a team sizing of a salaried partner and a couple of SAs and As, this would mean 3 cr to 5 cr.

Bringing in the work is both a mix of your abilities as a good lawyer and your social skills. You do not need to be a second generation lawyer (although it helps). Connections are built through friends, college mates who went in house, through introductions by existing clients to their other GC friends and of course through regular business development.

In order to reach this, by the time you are 8 PQE make sure you have at least one if not two dependable juniors who will help you execute the work such that you can take out 2 hours in a week to develop your market skills and connections. These are the juniors who you too will lead in the future when you become EP and to whom you will hand over part or your entire book as you grow.

It is not easy but it is also not as difficult as it may seem. You have to balance your work execution, client persuasion and team management along with whatever semblance you have of a family life. The real difficulty is scaling up to the next level, i.e. a 10 cr book.

For non-M&A teams, you have to figure out the right mix of taking up a couple of large mandates and smaller but voluminous matters to reach your targets. Start this exercise at 7 PQE and work towards it religiously. You will be able to achieve it.

If you have other questions, please feel free to ask. Its important that this conversation needs to be had in an otherwise self oriented profession where personal ambition/greed trumps healthy team and succession planning.

- Not that Old First Gen EP

did someone see this https://theprint.in/judiciary/bci-suspends-enrolment-of-nalsar-2026-grads-over-cji-convocation-row-cites-groupism-dirty-politics/3014014/

BCI first decided that outgoing NALSAR batch should not be allowed to enrol, later they modified their own order

if i am ever to provide an example of a capricious (improper and illegal) use of authority, i shall use this incident

When people ask why faculties stay silent on these issues, this is exactly why they stay silent:

https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/no-nalsar-graduate-of-2026-will-be-enrolled-as-advocate-says-bci-chairman-after-students-campaign-against-cji-surya-kant-545695

I’ve literally never voted for the bjp. So right off bat you’re making stupid assumptions.Youre borderline incoherent with that antisemitic nonsense. I have no dog in that race and you’re presuming all of my positions from one stray comment about how people of different political persuasions exist in positions of power. You claimed that having him in his position drove you suicidal- that’s actually disturbed. You need help. You need to learn that the world will have people who disagree with you and you will still have to get on and work with them and exhibit basic civility.

He called fake degree holders parasites. You may disagree with him - but baseline expectation is you actually know what he did to earn or not earn your condemnation. Is the Supreme Court the port of first call for every instance of police brutality in the country ? Was he simply trying to get on with his business - judging cases that actually were properly in the supreme courts jurisdiction instead of turning the court into a stage for a politicised media trial ? Honestly you sound quite uninformed and uneducated.

Which ideas of his are bad actually ? Why can’t students listen to ideas they disagree with once in a while ? What terrible thing would happen? What is your obsession with ideological purity ?

And let’s be real - Nalsar doesn’t provide a platform for the chief justice of India. Regardless of what these students do - he has already reached the goals he likely had in his professional life- goals almost none of these students will likely be able to reach. The only thing no platforming does - is reduce civility and polarise discourse in a democracy. It only puts you in a SILO - it’s not liberal - this is an anti-liberal move.

You absolutely have the freedom of speech to be as stupid as you’d like - but other people can call cancel culture what it is and they can decide your arguments are stupid. And ultimately - I’d hold the adults in your life responsible for failing to inculcate enlightenment values in you.

I understand for someone who hasn’t achieved much else in their professional life they want to assume that their opponents will always be poorly educated. In any case - you may choose to bury your head in the sand and not believe me - but I graduated from Nalsar- near the top of my class, and went on to do remarkably well. I’m actually a favorite son of the institution. Neither of our qualifications - should weigh into whether our arguments are valuable. That’s just base credentialism. Something NLU students would grow out of in their first year.

I know Gogoi wasn’t a chief guest- that wasn’t the point. The point was that this CJI unlike others hasn’t done anything personally to earn this kind of opprobrium. You may dislike him - but he didn’t write the ram janmabhoomi verdict, he didn’t write Supriyo, he hasn’t abused his powers and he hasn’t acted in a way unbecoming of his office. He’s actually a fairly middle of the road judge. His comments - are actually arguably taken out of context- he called people who hold fake degrees parasites and cockroaches - is it an elegant turn of phrase ? No. A wiser political movement might have asked what that implies about many public officials who have fake degrees. About protests- Supreme Court is not the place to investigate allegations of police misconduct at the first instance. It’s an appellate court.

What exactly has surya Kant done to earn this ? Is it that he supports a political party- or is seen to support a party - that Nalsar students dislike ? If that’s enough reason to behave in so uncivil and discourteous a manner - I’m afraid these students will have a rude shock coming to them when they go into the profession where most professionals are right wing.

It is of course students right to be as stupid as they’d like - just as it is mine to call them on it. I really think maybe their educators have failed them at this point. It absolutely is not the essence of Nalsar to be entitled and ignorant and to engage in cancel culture. The essence of Nalsar - was developing deep thoughtful young people who were committed to being good lawyers.

Clearly never been to Telangana, have you? You're the one in a bubble. And the reason NALSAR (or any NLU) will never have the streets in the same way as IITs or AIIMS is because law as a profession is largely looked down upon in India. Doesn't take away from them being the peak of the profession (sorry JGLS)

Updated list.

1. Ravindra Bandhakavi (to a direct competitor) 2. Shaneen Parikh (to a direct competitor)

3. Kapil Arora (to a direct competitor)

4. Ajay Sawhney (to a direct competitor)

5. Abhilash Pillai (to a direct competitor)

6. Faraz Alam Sagar (to a direct competitor)

7. Aditi Misra (to a direct competitor)

8. Bhupendra Verma (to a direct competitor)

9. Rachika Sahay (to a direct competitor)

10. Garima Shahani (to a direct competitor)

11. Amarta Roy(to a direct competitor)

12. Poornima Singh(to a direct competitor)

13. Srabanee Ghosh(to a direct competitor)

14. Anchal Dhir(to a direct competitor)

15. Shubham Rastogi(to a direct competitor)

16. Omar Ahmad (going for independent counsel practice)

17. Gauhar Mirza(to a direct competitor)

18. Reuben Chacko(to a direct competitor)

19. RC (with some other partners) - easily 4-5 partners together.

20. YA (with some other partners) - easily 4-5 partners together

21. Vartika Jain (moved in house)

22. Ashwin Sapra(to a direct competitor)

23. Alok Shankar (going for independent counsel practice)

24. Anandita Kaushik (moved in house)

25. LV (moving to academics)

Easily a loss of approximately 35 partners within a year.

More exits will come post Diwali bonus. In any case blast for next March is also already in pipeline.

are they going to come back to India or are they going to settle in the UK? that is the question

there are plenty of NLU grads who have gone to the UK, have done their PhD on scholarship there and have settled there

we can celebrate their success, but what good does it do to the Indian unis?

What an unprecedented move! The Bar Council of India (BCI) Chairperson has directed all State Bar Councils not to enrol students who graduated from the NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, in 2026 as advocates until further orders, while seeking a factual report from the university on those involved in a campaign opposing the participation of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant in its convocation.

The pay structure at ELP is very uneven. At the same level, one attorney may be earning less than the other. They don’t have pay band systems for different PQEs/designations and are non-transparent about the level of pay at each level. Bonuses are uneven too. So, while one attorney may feel they are earning more, another one feels shortchanged. Brutal fact is, people know about it too, but god knows why they have stuck around at ELP.

They’re a smaller firm so naturally have lesser hiring needs. They however pay at par with T1s which means they have T1 level demand for jobs without the similar no of openings. That’s the case at TT&A as well, especially their Mumbai teams. They also have a relatively higher retention rate, which means they have a higher proportion of mid-level associates as compared to your typical T1s

It's just that they have smaller teams, that's all. They don't hire enough because they don't have as much business or verticals to compare against a T1 law firm, but they want to retain their tag of being good paymasters for retaining talent. Hence, the hiring has to be selective. No degree of selection is perfect, so they often choose to just go by law school tags, internship performance, and more comprehensive interview setting borrowed from foreign law firms. As someone who's never worked with them (they don't do my niche), I actually quite like their recruitment approach.

Answering this a bit seriously, now there are a few checks and balances that may happen. For instance, the externals- we do not know who we are marking- we mark 1 part of answer script of 250-300 papers. So practically, one teacher failing a student on its own- that would be almost impossible.

Because all NLUs (except Bengaluru) are run by TLC cabals and they fear NLU alumni mobilising! At IIMs, the governing bodies are dominated by alumni. This is their biggest fear!

Re Jindal, it's a one-man show by Rajkumar and he is not too comfortable with a strong alumni body either. He only cultivates a few pet favourites.

Good for you but we don't have that opportunity of interning while also attending college because tier 2 peeps live in Orissa, punjab, Bihar, UP, tamil nadu, you on the other hand live in mumbai, you can go do your long term internship come back home to a hot meal, you expect us to do 1 year long internships? This js just privilege speaking

Totally agree whatever you said. These professors let you down by giving bad grades and even by failing you, just because our answers r not as per their expectation. Like every student has different way of writing & thinking, these professor try to impose their political thought on students. Students who are goody goody with the professors get O or excellent marks. & when others get low marks they give the label of mental illness & ask them tk taje counselling services.

'Leadership' is more about management than law. In 'legal leadership', the emphasis is on the latter word and not the former. It doesn't take too many brain cells to understand why IIMA was picked over an NLU. This really has nothing to do with NLUs not being national institutions. Also, given up on openly advertising NFSU?

Second year law student at a tier 69 uni. started with litigation internships from my first year but eventually realised i can't sustain it without a godfather in this profession. tryna pivot towards corporate and recently interned at the NCLAT tribunal and found IBC kinda interesting. What should I read to build a base in corporate law and IBC, which internships should I target going forward, so i can at least land a tier 2-3 firm by the end of my degree??