Hi there. I would 100% do some diligence on this :-)

Please speak to our ex-interns as well as folks who work with us currently. Most of them are on Linkedin. If you're not able to get through directly, feel free to write to me (shreya at sra dot law) and I'll have someone check and send you the contact details of folks who are willing to chat. We are pretty confident about what you'll hear, and believe that honest conversations are fundamental to a healthy work environment, which means: no unwelcome questions. It's also always good to do some homework on who you will be working with.

Some clarifications on the comments above:

- Work Environment: Our work environment is absolutely tough. We're an embarrassingly nerdy bunch and take standards very seriously. The projects are frequently complex and everyone including A0s regularly deal with multiple areas of law within tax & PCP. Not for folks who like routine; we think we'd be a good fit for people who enjoy the law and who are generalists at heart while still loving tax. What we can promise, is that ours is not a hostile environment. Everyone, at every level of seniority is held up to the same standards of mutual concern and respect, and supportive culture is an org level commitment and expectation.

- Attrition: We've only had two people leave till date. One left to do a masters in tax at Georgetown after spending a year with us (which is again something that we encourage - no subterfuge required if you're planning to do LLM applications). The other left during his probation since he wanted to spend more time on litigation in Delhi. We are still 1.5 years young, so we may yet see exits on bad terms, but to say "People leave in three four months" is misinformation steeped in ignorance or bad faith.

- Job Openings: We are still considering applications for 2026 intake. But, we are a small org, and selective, and only hire freshers through internships (no campus recruitment). If you would like more details about the internship process pls visit our Linkedin page or write to us (internships at sra dot law with a cc to shreya at sra dot law). Hope this helps!

Proviso: Everything said below is based strictly on my knowledge of law firms in the UK environment, as your question seems like you're asking mostly about UK. Some of this may vary a bit if you're looking at Singapore or Hong Kong.

1. First, get your terminology right: "training contracts", not "trainee contracts" or any other variation of the same you might see used on any website (including this one). Short form: TC (singular) or TCs (plural).

2. Importance of grades: Quite high. You need to be among the best students in your cohort if you are from an Indian university. I've seen students who are not as good or sincere students of law academically getting taken on from UK unis, but nobody who's not above average. So basically, the only difference is that you have to be excellent in your studies, whereas a UK uni applicant can afford to be above average.

3. Importance of moots: High. You can talk about transferrable skills from moots you will find useful in the law firm environment on your written applications or perhaps even at interview. Also participate in negotiation competitions. Your uni administration, I have heard, regards this latter as a bit of a waste of your time. Totally not true. That's one of the few things that your VC, otherwise a smart guy who is up there with the best, being a Rhodes Scholar and an Oxford DPhil, gets wrong because of his status as a total theory person and his lack of experience of law firm environments.

4. Commercial awareness: This is an atypical one. For a host of complex reasons, they don't at this point (treating you as an applicant) care so much about evaluating your technical knowledge as evaluating your knowledge of the market and your ability to think about the law firm's position within the market as a business, and how various events might impact it. That's commercial awareness in a nutshell. You might also see the term "commercial acumen" used, this means the same thing, though most people in the UK who talk about these things use "commercial awareness". How do you gain this? Well, reading the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal or the Economist for a start. Personally, I'd spend a lot of time with the FT, if I could. If your uni doesn't have access to a subscription to it, ask them (fight with them, very fiercely, if needed) to ensure you have access to one. I'd especially concentrate on newsletters (and articles within the FT paper itself linked within them) such as FT Due Dilligence (a great newsletter, which gives you regular updates every weekday Tuesday to Friday about goes on in the PE and VC worlds, even with some great stuff about law firms), First FT Europe/Africa, FT Briefing UK Morning Headlines (providing a list of articles in at least two of the categories of "Politics", "Public Policy", "Companies", "Economy" and "Business") (you'll need to ensure that a premium subscription is taken out for this one, unfortunately, but the product is excellent so don't let that stop you) and "Inside Politics" (usually written by Stephen Bush, but sometimes by equally good colleagues of his), which gives analysis of large issues in UK politics. Why do you need all this? Because "commercial awareness" means understanding not just legal or economic implications of stuff, but evaluating the political or tech ramifications of stuff. Some people tend to analyse events to put their best foot forward in terms of demonstrating commercial awareness by using something called the 'PESTLE method' - each letter of that name is an ingredient of what your analysis should encompass. I won't bother explaining PESTLE to you, you can yourself read about it on a website called lawcareers.net, which is great if you want a UK law firm career. Other than that, listen to the podcasts that some law firms do which can help to raise commercial awareness. Shoesmiths, for example, has an excellent one, I believe. Other than that, read a book called 'Everything You Need to Know about the City', by Chris Stokes, which explains how London works as a financial hub.

5. Understand the difference and gain knowledge: Indian and British law firm environments are very different in various ways that you will get to know over time. For now, one way which is very important for you to know is something you may find a bit counterintuitive. In England and Wales, they don't expect you to specialise in a practice area in the training contract stage. So going in hot saying I want to do regulated payments or b&f is not necessarily the smartest thing to be doing when you're trying to persuade them to recruit you. You need to be open to learning through your vac scheme and/or TC from work the firm does in multiple practice areas. This is because of regulator expectations imposed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), which requires trainee solicitors to be exposed to multiple practice areas in their Qualifying Work Experience (QWE) (which a TC is) period of two years. The way most firms handle this requirement is to expose you to (usually) four practice areas with rotations over a six month period. These rotations are usually called "seats". Each "seat" is six months in duration. Once you are done with your TC, you "qualify into" one of the four seats you did when you were a trainee, as a Newly Qualified (NQ) solicitor. Therefore, at the stage of you being an applicant, it may not be too good an idea to be too firm on what practice area you want to get into. You can (and should, obviously) mention which are your interests, but your cover letters/written application answers should focus more on how exposure to different types of work at a particular firm will help your career development as a lawyer. Therefore, you'll have to basically swallow the websites of the law firms you choose to apply to, because ideally, no sentence you write about a law firm in a cover letter for that law firm should be the type you can copy-paste into a cover letter for another firm, i.e., you know firm x's deals so well that you can write a cover letter aimed so specifically at that firm that people will gain the impression that your life's ambition, ever since you were able to do more as a baby than sucking your mother's thumb, has been to, let us say, work at HSFK. Make a note of this very carefully, because our cultural assumptions about the British is that they don't do things like this. We assume American unis make people do more generalised learning before becoming specialised, while Indians and the British expect you to go in with your specialism set right away. MC and U.S. law firm environments in London... don't work exactly like that.

Obviously, there are exceptions to this (which still fulfil the SRA requirement of exposure to multiple practice areas), such as the leveraged finance (LevFin) TC that Milbank's London office does: https://www.legalcheek.com/2025/01/milbank-creates-training-contract-for-aspiring-leveraged-finance-lawyers/

In these cases, like you see in the article, they expose you to let us say LevFin as a practice area, while also getting you to do other stuff. For such TCs, you can be more enthusiastic in your applications about work the firm does in that particular practice area.

6. Another significant difference in the working method - the vac scheme and the TC: In the Indian law firm environment, they usually make you do an internship, then call you back for another, then decide whether to offer you a job. Not so in the MC and U.S. law firms' UK operations. Essentially, think of the vac scheme as an assessment internship for the TC, because, if you get onto a vac scheme, many law firms will assess your potential for a TC through your vac scheme performance without necessarily needing you to apply again. In fact, some firms do things such that they won't accept direct TC applications, but only assess TC potential from their vac scheme cohort. Therefore, your vac scheme is your one big chance to convince them that you're worth it for a TC, because they're giving you that one opportunity to prove yourself worthy of a TC. Then, the TC is basically a drawn-out, two-year-long, assessment internship for them to decide whether you're worth it as an associate (i.e., whether it's worth them keeping you on as an NQ post TC).

7. SQE: Once they've offered you a TC, they'll make you study for the SQE (the Solicitors Qualifying Exam, imposed by the regulator), which you'll have to pass as a condition of your TC offer - if you don't pass, they will withdraw your TC offer. Basically, how this works for many firms is that they make you get on a university course (that they pay for) called an SQE LLM, that helps prep you for the SQE. Why these courses (offered by providers such as BPP and ULaw) are called 'SQE LLM' is that in addition to SQE training, they offer elective modules in various areas, e.g., IP. NB/warning: It's not a good idea for you to try and disrupt the order of this process, by self-financing your 'SQE LLM' studies and then applying to law firms. Many law firms will have specific electives that they will ask you, as part of your TC offer, to take up. If you do the SQE LLM on your own, you may not do the electives a particular law firm will want you to do. That's why take things in their order: apply for a vac scheme (or direct TC), then go for the SQE LLM on their money, because that's how they want you to do things. They pay your course fees and give you a stipend.

8. Practicing assessments: Foreign law firms tend to have a more involved and complex interview and testing process than their Indian counterparts. One of the things many of them (especially the MC guys) do a lot is the so-called 'Situational Judgment Test (SJT)'. This might be a type of multiple choice question test where they give you situations that crop up in everyday law firm life and give you four options out of which you have to choose one to deal with that situation. There is no "objectively" correct answer to many of those situations, reasonable people might disagree how to handle each of those, according to their own personalities. But you will have to answer based on your knowledge of the firm's ethos and culture. Therefore, you'll have to go past the corporate buzzwords on the websites, and actually get to know current trainees or NQs working at whichever firms you are applying to and ask about the culture. Based both on what you've read and understood from your networking research, you can answer those SJT type questions. Many also use more standardised kind of tests such as Watson Glazer. Get as many of these practice tests done as you possibly can, only way to handle this aspect. Also, in both interviews (individual chats between you and a law firm person or sometimes a pannel) and Assessment Centres (ACs) (a type of assessment in which they see how you work in a group of your fellow applicants), they might give you a case study and ask you to work on it. Get hold of some of the kinds of things they've tended to give out in the past (maybe from your seniors, maybe from trainees of other kinds at those law firms) and practice this element, too. This is where your question on the RCC comes in. Most law firms do not really recruit from the RCC in that way. Some might have some involvement with the RCC in some way, but that really depends from firm to firm. But what you can try to get your RCC to do (because this is the type of thing student law societies at UK unis do) is to get the firms to send along let us say a trainee + graduate recruitment pannel who'll present the law firm to you and maybe talk you through a sample of such an exercise. But mostly, it's applying on your own.

9. Final point - non-legal work experience: Another substantial difference between Indian and foreign law firm environments. If you've worked at a Pizza Express or something, for example, in an Indian law firm setting, you'd be made to defend yourself and justify why you did such work. Not so in the case of foreign law firms. In fact, they tend to take quite an encouraging tone towards getting at least some non-legal work experience. They believe it to be useful as a source of developing transferrable skills that will be useful in a commercial environment. Therefore, you need to understand what are the core skills and attributes each firm you'll be applying to is looking for in a trainee, then in your written application, CV or cover letter, find a way of arguing how your non-legal experience would have contributed towards building those attributes. If you really want to go into a foreign law firm environment, doing some of this type of thing might be a better use of your time than doing repeated and random Indian law firm internships, though some of those are likely to be useful to you, too.

Makes no difference, NLUD has almost entirely the same opportunities as NLS as far as recruitments go and its quality is as good, if not better, given the smaller batch size now. And no needless domicile quota and whatnot. You’ll be competing with lesser students and will naturally have more opportunities to get placed if you’re a half decent student.

Didn't Bar and Bench said 100 per cent, with 95 people placed?

https://www.barandbench.com/Law-School/recruitment-tracker/rectracker-nalsar-2025-batch-records-100-placements-global-law-firm-offers-65-lakh-per-annum

I just want to put this out there. CAM is extremely extremely ▮▮▮. For any fresher planning to join, please literally join any other firm (can even be a tier 2) but do not join CAM. CAM had forced me to change my location and had promised to absorb me in a particular team in Delhi. I agreed and was alright with the decision. Now, they have given me a team that I have no interest or experience in, this is after changing my location on the pretext of getting a particular team. HR refuses to shift my team too.
CAM is completely ▮▮▮- don't believe anything that they say, they are hell bent on ▮▮▮. If you have an Offer from CAM (any office) ▮▮▮.

Just had our researcher test today. The prop is on governmental company owned by Niskandha state. Prepped well the advance contract and arbitration code. But apparently moot culture at NLUO is all time low because of TMS. Who asks criminal law questions in such test. C’mon get a life bruhh!

Isn’t it so nice to say people lack nuance when they don’t qualify everything they’re saying with a thousand exceptions because you know someone who knows someone who isn’t a terrible student even though they were rich and pampered and went to private college?

Make a damn affirmative statement about what you’re seeing in our universities or let someone who can do.

The easiest thing in the world to do when someone points to a problem is to argue the edge exception case and say “ ah but what you say is not always happening”. It adds nothing to any conversation at all.

I didn’t say anything about NLU. Students going to state universities - government universities that make you kill everything you eat. Will be hard workers and hustlers- when they have to kill to eat. There’s a few of those students who might not be ambitious and might have connections so they typically put in less effort but over all that’s a verrrrry different demographic to Jgls.

In any case the trouble with state universities is that they have hungry students but the universities aren’t run properly enough to discipline guide and educate these students so they mostly don’t know as much about opportunities that are out there.

No one who is joining nalsar or nls is allowed to persist with the notion that they are owed anything by the world. Most of them are not geniuses , not are they very hardworking. But one of the first things your seniors and college profs and everyone else tells you in those places is - you better get ready to work because no one can promise you anything . You might have been big shot in school but everyone starts at zero in law school. That thing is beaten into you. And you internalise it. And it’s true for most of them- they don’t have parents promising them a job even if they don’t work. They’re just incentivised to work harder than your average Jgls student.

Obviously not every Jgls student is a pampered brat. What an idiotic thing to say- the point is trends, averages. Most of them just have no need to be hungry or to achieve- they’ve been promised the world and they will be given it whether or not they earn it. And they absolutely make life terrible for faculty and the handful of students who are motivated. What teenager who is put in that situation would behave differently?

Obviously not everything goes according to plan when you parent. But the point is to parent regardless. My mom deliberately made my brother live in a free hostel for destitute boys during his undergrad. She could have afforded fancy on campus hostel where he would have richer friends. She deliberately went the other way because she wanted her son to learn what it means to be hungry and to need to succeed- that and she saved the money for my education. And that worked for him. He’s doing very well now. Obviously at the time it caused some friction because he wanted to have the best and she felt the need to give her child the best too- but she realised at the time that more important than giving her son everything he wanted was to teach him values and keep him on the straight and narrow.

Isn’t it so curious that when we get in to law school it’s all merit and when our children fail you’ll say it’s all luck ? What a terrible way to delegitimise the achievements of other peoples children. Who in many cases did not grow up with lawyer parents and go to best schools but simply crammed and studied and scored better points. Of course you think all the kids you know deserved to go to nls. Why anyone should take your word for it is beyond me.

It’s not the worst thing in the world for parents to sometimes admit they’re children aren’t the best at everything. That’s got more to do with your ego than it has to do with the best for your kids. Your kid probably won’t be Sachin Tendulkar or Beethoven and they probably won’t be Alan dershowitz either. What they definitely have equal opportunity to be is someone who is grounded, who knows who they are, who is a pleasure to work with both because of behaviour and work ethic. You deny them those things when you don’t tell them the truth.

3L funds is▮▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮, with people leaving in large numbers every year. There is politics in the team, have heard that a ▮▮▮ yells, but in the end they have good quality work and excellent exposure.

ICUL leads the funds industry with the highest volume of fund setups, which translates into heavy workloads and pressure, though it remains less ▮▮▮ compared to 3L.

KCO is good in all aspects - working hours, culture and quality of work.

AZB Funds - they are building their practice again by hiring a new partner. But, one should altogether avoid joining azb as a firm.

CAM/ BLC typically have lighter workloads than the above, resulting in comparatively better working hours. BLC, in particular, is known for its supportive culture, though you do take a hit on pay compared to the Tier-1 firms. CAM’s funds practice is often criticised for being ▮▮▮.

Regarding pay - Trilegal/KCO/CAM/AZB - almost similar (there may be slight variation in terms of fixed and bonus). BLC pay- equivalent to a tier II firm.

exactly. seems like bro yapped on and on to flex how "rich" he claims to be. like bro if you're eton level rich, why are you crying on legallyindia. dont be a loser, go do some grass-touching rich family stuff like traveling to your private island in private jets or playing golf with CEOs.

I work in tier 1 capital markets team and have been here for last 10 years or more. I come from a traditional business family and my parents are HNIs and my friends come from ultra rich families. We work for one or more of the following reasons:

We don’t want to join family business or family profession

We still want to make our parents proud

We were taught to work hard no matter what and we have seen our parents slog as well

We want to be respected by society and not be seen as brats

We have skills and want to see those skills being applied

We enjoy the grind and hustle especially since we have otherwise very comfortable lifestyles

Our families may be asset rich and not cash rich and we need liquidity

We need liquidity and want to protect our self respect by not using family money

Some of us keep ourselves busy till we get married (mostly women)

Some of us keep ourselves busy so we don’t have to get married (mostly men)

We are married and want our spouse to respect us

We want to taste the corporate culture

Someone in our family is a lawyer and we look up to that relative

We may have chosen this profession for the same reason as everyone else but without the need to struggle for contacts or money

We feel our family contacts will give us an edge

We can network better

Some of us are required to prove ourselves especially since we haven’t joined family business or profession

Some families don’t prefer to have all kids in businesses and having someone with stable jobs allows for better risk allocation

1. JRF is given to the top scorers in UGC NET exam. Earlier it was 1% but now had dropped down to 0.5% of people who clear.

2. At the current rate it's 37K+HRA per month. But you won't get it every month, it's usually once in 3 months combined. There has been rumours of increasing it to 50K per month.

3. It's a salary that is being provided by the central government. So, NO, you cannot work part-time. There is no double income scheme. You may teach, advocate or research assist but you can't get paid for it. If found out, you will get punished. This ranges from getting kicked out of your PhD program, having to pay a fine, having to return whatever you've earned in JRF or part thereof, having been barred from PhD etc

4. If you want to genuinely be a professor, and get into academia. Make sure you clear the NET, get admission in a decent university, start your PhD and if possible do it fulltime. Majority of people who do a part-time PhD are already professors in some college and need the PhD for promotions.

What does the salary hike look like when switching as a lateral from in-house to a T1? Considering the compensation of in-house lawyers is a lot less, does this affect the compensation offered to laterals? Will the compensation get a big correction to the relevant band's range?

Let's say a candidate is offered A2 level, will the compensation be in the range of the A2 band of the firm or would it depend on the last drawn salary.

Hi

I have been working at any Advocate's chamber since 2021

I am the only junior there

The senior is otherwise a very decent chap

Has never stopped me from pursuing independent matters etc

I want to change chambers only because I want experience in type of matters which this senior does not take

The notice period here is One Month

Is this too much?

Will it affect my moves to some other Chambers?

On a side note, should I accept offers from chambers not supporting independent matters of my own?

Mods, please publish

Thanks

Bro is living in 2015. No doubt Sid is very influential but the practice has gotten bigger with newer players taking up massive share in the market. There is no single partner that can be attributed as the best anymore. Trilegal has the likes of AJ, Sai and Pallabi who also have a huge chunk of top tier clientele now.