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The core dispute: after tendering notice, the firm unilaterally curtailed the contractual 30-day notice period by cutting the last working day short — conveniently avoiding the obligation to pay fee in lieu of notice. The timing is hard to miss: the truncation neatly sidestepped a bonus payment that would have triggered at month-end under the retainership terms.
The notice goes further — raising claims for a promised increment with arrears effective November 2025, which the firm strung along with vague, non-committal responses for months. When pushed, the partners apparently told the associate to “remind them in March” — and then quietly ensured there was no March to remind them in.
The firm’s reply cited performance concerns — without a single particular to back them up. Convenient, given that during the entire period the associate was being billed out to clients and appreciated internally.
The notice also flags professional misconduct by the partners and an inappropriate work environment — details the associate says they’re happy to share with moderators directly.
Also, with your interest in the topic, you could probably start a business around this, if you chose to...
This semester I had a mandatory graded moot and I used SCC Online, AIR and their likes for the first time, and the sheer inefficiency boggled me. This clearly wasn't going to work in the long term, I have 6 semesters left, which comes to around 36 assignments, and I need better. So I started with API reverse engineering. Not a huge problem for me, I have done this in the past, I have worked with documented trading APIs and I have been messing with websites for 3 years now, so I had a very decent working knowledge, knew how stuff works. It isn't particularly difficult either, all you need is a sense of architecture and curiosity; I'm a law student who came from a commerce background with a fascination for computers, so it's not difficult. I kept building on top of that SCC Online MCP, and now the problem is that there's so much to download and index that it is becoming difficult. Even setting up a cron job at this scale is proving to be difficult.
I am actively trying to make the offline corpus bigger, I aim to include as many reports as possible, Gazettes, Parliamentary Debates, laws that were drafted but never passed, articles from public journals in my DB. Right now it just has laws and a few hundred important and major reports. The problem is the majority of the stuff is not organised, so downloading, indexing and organising is a huge task. I hit a wall multiple times and still hit one with every new source, but it is well worth it. I use this solely for assignments, as I was never interested in moots and research papers, so I am not hurrying like my career depends on it.
That said, I am trying to fix all the errors and make the DB public, access to structured data shouldn't be a bottleneck for anyone. I cannot make the MCPs public for obvious reasons. It took me about 2 weeks with a lot of work, around half a dozen all-nighters and once I worked 8 hours straight to put things in perspective, and that's with my background; the part that took time was trying to come up with ways to improve it. From scratch with no background, 2 to 4 hours a week, it should take anyone willing 5 to 6 months. It is a little difficult to make and work with, but it is a complete game-changer for anyone willing to put in the work. Any small law firm or solo lawyer can and should be able to adopt this as well once it is more stable and bigger.
I'm also working on a model interconnect so ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Kimi and Deepseek can debate each other and find flaws in the output. This would strengthen the reasoning capability significantly, and the best part is it would still be cheap af, though it is proving more difficult than I thought.
This is also better than commercial tools because it is not bound by a lot of the institutional stuff they are bound by, liability hedging, locked-in models, fixed pipelines. They also cannot just reverse-engineer APIs, download stuff off the internet and call it a day, and they have to build something sustainable as a business. Since you're paying for the subscription of AI services directly, you get far better value, as the API itself is much costlier, and after the overhead of the company you're either paying very high prices or paying for it in the quality.
The best part about this entire system is that you're always in control of everything, the reasoning capacity, data, model type, costs, the offline corpus, how you want the output to look like. The entire thing is practice-agnostic, you can fetch data, make a database and start it. Plus the custom instructions in CLI are followed much more thoroughly than they are in the web. It is cheap as well, especially if you use opencode go.
If anyone wants to build something like this and needs technical help, feel free to reach out at LIunofficialtechhelp.contact@proton.me. Do not ask me for the MCPs, I won't be sharing them for obvious reasons, and don't try to buy them either, you'll be wasting your time. I can guide you through building your own, but sharing mine crosses a line I'm not willing to cross. I'll be lurking on the thread for a few days as well if anyone has doubts.
I feel I am in a pretty good position to reply to this. I gave CLAT 3 times, first 2 times was getting NLU Sonipat, third time I landed in NALSAR. I was exactly where you were and I just want to tell you one thing. ITS OK. IT WILL WORK OUT.
I know you must have a lot of questions just eating away at you every single second. Just know, that feeling is normal. You'll eventually get over it (or atleast as close to it as one can get) Self-harm will not help you tackle these feelings. Soon you'll get a sense of stability back in your life, that's when it starts to get better.
There's a lot I want to just rant to you, all kinds of tips, all kinds of frustrations, just so many things that would others might not even spend a moment thinking about but hounds those who take double drops, but idt it will help you right now. I just hope this comment that I am leaving here will give you the strength to go on.
I'll still try to answer some of the questions you have asked, but if you still have any more doubts, questions or anything feel free to drop me a mail at burner.mail.9.3.4.1@gmail.com
Are double droppers discriminated or treated differently socially?
While on a surface level the answer is no, there are still some moments where you end up feeling bad about being a double dropper. Most of the times people would not mean it, but the words some people end up saying still hurts a lot. For those moments I only hope that the fact that there are so so so many like us all around us and even all over law colleges become a solace for you. But again most of the time people don't really care, and especially beyond the first year nobody cares about this stuff, everyone is too busy just trying to keep their own lifes normal that they don't have any energy for such stuff.
And as for if you get a good rank this time, will your previous failures still be relevant?
Well, those are your life experiences. They always stay with you, its upto you to not let them become some lingering negativities and to use them for your own benefit.
Now, as someone else in this thread already said, once you are in no opportunities are out of your hand.
I have just finished my second year, and am about to enter the third year, if anyone had told the me that had just gotten out after having written CLAT the second time and knowing that I had absolutely ruined that paper that I will be where I am today, I don't think I would have ever believed that. But life always has mysterious things in store for us. The highs and the lows that I have experienced after all of that just make it all seem just so... in the past. Trust me when I say it's not the end for you, YOU can still make your life into something that you don't regret. That's all that counts in the end.
Wishing things get better for you soon, and you look back to these moments of your life at your lowest points and use it to pick yourself up.
Personally, I've found the JNLUD to be interesting. I read it regularly though not fully. There's indconlawphil, but that's not really it.
Senior research fellow would be 1.25 lakhs around im guessing.
1. Purely research and policy - Freshers get 40-50k. Career trajectory may take you till 90k and all. Senior level positions may be around 1.3 to 1.5L.
2. Lobby organisations - Won't name them - but organisations which basically tend to publish research which favours a particular lobby of industrialists / sector players / strongmen - 10k to 20k higher. (Zero ethics though)
3. Political Consultancies cum Policy Organisations - Either from Right or Left spectrum - Depending on where you are coming from + your last CTC, they are known to pay the highest.
Hope this helps. Though the career growth plateau is very real in policy, until and unless you are smart enough to make it into the big corporates with their own policy departments.
Well timed
Room inventory list
The following table indicates the number of rooms of each category available for Men and Women residents
Inventory
2 Bed
3 bed (cubicle)
3 bed (Non bunk)
3 bed (Bunk)
Total Beds
Men’s Residences
75
66
39
18
519
Women’s Residences
40
21
5
93
437
Budget cuts?
Mass layoffs?
Recruitment freeze?
How bad will it be?
Of course, nepo kids will remain unscathed but my question is about regular people.
https://www.ndtvprofit.com/markets/uday-kotak-says-prepare-for-the-worst-urges-india-to-brace-for-big-shock-from-us-iran-conflict-11482577
Anyone here who spent years in BigLaw and then went independent? How did it go? Are you still independent? Do you regret it? What was more rewarding for you? How did you manage to build clients?
Ok maybe it wasn’t a quick question rather few but you get the drift. Your kind comments will help few souls.
Still good enough to read The Caravan, India Today, Economic Times & Times of India etc.
1) PAY - It is definitely less than the average corporate pay. In fact, your peers in corp will always earn more, even if you are breaking into Tier 1 [at least I believe so; I could have negotiated my own deal poorly lol]. At 4 PQE, a lot of my friends have been struggling to crack 1L a month (in hand), while corp/lit people seem to be getting it quicker.
2) OVER-SPECIALIZATION - So Boutiques largely run the game in terms of prosecution (at least in Delhi), and also (owing to the SME business they take up as opposed to big ticket clients that a Tier 1 looks for) do see a lot of highly tricky cases. But they also overly-compartmentalize. In fact, prosecution itself is broken down into: contention and non-contentious. I have spent time at firms where I literally just did oppositions or prosecutions or C&Ds. In full-service, there are two firms (in my mind) which are attempting to also take on the prosecution game - KCO and FM. The name of the game with these firms is volume, even if it comes at the cost of lower prices. Result: the usually under-staffed associate team takes the brunt. But, owing to being full-service, they often get work outside of prosecution/litigation/core IP as well (such as metrology advisory, even a little bit of data privacy compliance). Personally, I believe I should have pursued a more general role than IP prosecution, as it is highly specific.
3) Lack of feedback: If you venture into IP prosecution. I have two specific gripes I want you to know: 1) In 2026, I believe a substantial number of attorneys who have made it to the top, came-up at a time where IP laws were a little too lax. I thus find my faith waning a lot in such partners (usually people who have only done prosecution and are now partners in prosecution teams). I actually kind of blame allowing trade mark agents into prosecution. It's just a shitty mix where the attorneys in this field feel like more sophisticated TM agents without the rigour of law. E.g. - It's an entire industry who functioned on putting a Stamp Paper of INR 100 for allllll POAs without any of them even once consulting the Stamp Duty Act, ever - An.Entire.Industry. 2) TM Registry has a loooong waiting period. You can initiate an opposition and then have to wait like 6 years for an answer to come your way on merits, with no interim hearings, no update, nothing. Thus, the problem? You have a partner you can't entirely trust and a system which is not quick enough for you to truly see if your arguments bear any merit in the actual game. In some existential sense, I believe that not a growth has happened for me owing to that. I do read a lot and constantly attempt to get better sectoral knowledge and hope to upskill myself. I have also had good partners, so touch wood, I don't feel lost. But this feeling is there.
P.S - I must admit, I am writing this at a time of my life where I am frankly a little embittered with IP Prosecution and am actively moving away from it to a more transactional IP space. I know people who are having a lot of fun in this space too. No work is bad work in law if you're willing to think your way through it like a lawyer - meticulous and forensic. So don't take this to mean IP prosecution is a dead route.
P.S.S - My career (as on date) has been fully Delhi. It is possible other cities have better experiences. But I largely Delhi to be ahead in IP.
P.S.S - About the Feedback Loop. I must also admit, the TM Registry is becoming more vigilant, more stringent, and better. Thus, in 3 years time this comment might have been ancient and unusable to fingers crossed
Is the reported a dodgy fellow?
Instead of researching MCA notifications, you look up TRAI white papers. Any team/partner placing an emphasis on coding is largely doing it for optics, since no firm is using or deploying any internally developed tools in any case.
As far as skills - like any other area - have good research skills, know the latest updates in the area for examples how IT Rules have been periodically amended, the PROG Rules etc etc.
TMT is not a hype that will die lol, it's a growing sector.
You can hear more from an experienced partner in this podcast: https://youtu.be/i8nuVoesCJ8?si=Y3HcKNylsNFsH3yI
However, one issue that has persisted, as rightly pointed out by Anirudh in his tweet, is the very same culture of loud-mouthed left-oriented students trying to push down any ideology they don't agree with, which has not only persisted but has gotten entrenched in the GB as a whole. The issue lies with the overall culture that is being propogated within the university and that needs to be countered with voices that arent necessarily RW but rather simply more open minded and tolerant.
People shouldn’t take politics so seriously and it’s not a good look for a senior advocate to be ranting on Twitter non-stop. I hope he’s okay.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2026/05/11/indias-pricey-private-universities-want-to-take-on-the-ivy-league
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/indias-pricey-private-universities-want-take-ivy-league-w4sdc
Here you go
Will he stop his multi nation trips?
Will his party folks stop moving in 100 car cavalcades when they go to their constituencies?
Will those big families close to him stop using 20 cars in their cavalcade?
Hell no. Hypocrisy rules.
All the advisories for the janta.
Some guidance please from skilled and experienced ass kissers.