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Then comes 2,3,4 ranks....
Both nalsar and nlud will become more preferred in few years.
NLS will become number 2 or 3 soon.
It breaks your confidence to be treated like that as a first-year lawyer, and I wish I had joined a Tier 2/3 firm at a lesser pay but with better stability and people.
Also, does KCo do the same?
- MS
CB is Crawford Bayley. They pay around 12 lpa with an infamous 3 year bond. Try mailing Sanjay Asher, although they're not looking to hire much from what I have heard.
You can also try applying to Rajani and Rajaram Legal (now River Law), they're good but picky. Keep an eye for others like Desai Diwanji and Bharucha as well other than T-1s.
In terms of :-
1. Pay Scale
2. Work Culture etc.
It means either, for reader’s ease.
This includes listed instruments issued via private placement (similar to QIPs on ECM side) and listed instruments issued via public issue (debt IPO / FPO basically). There is also foreign bond issuances where Indian counsels are involved (RegS/144A issuances). There aren't many teams that do all these regularly. For example TTA has a team that specialises in foreign bond issuances, even JSA does I think. Most banking and finance teams also dabble in privately places listed debt issuances. Only a few do public issue of NCDs.
Finding a team that does ECM and DCM together will be good if you intend to be a capital markets lawyer. It's anyday good to diversify.
The DCM team in KCo does all sorts of matters (listed NCDs (private placement and public issue), municipal bonds, foreign bonds, etc.). They have also worked on a few ECM deals sprinkled here and there. There must be other T1s also similarly placed.
However this field is very methodic and process oriented. Not much innovation or scope for doing bespoke transactions (unless you are doing structured finance deals, restructuring etc.).
WLB is non existent in most T1s DCM/B&F teams as banking / dcm lawyers are expected to meet unreasonable deadlines and unless you have a partner who can set the boundaries with the clients, you'll have long weekends and ruined holidays. Some firms manage this better some are worse. Depends on the team and partner like always. Compensation is on the better side because there is always workflow (except foreign bonds, where work can stop suddenly) and DCM teams mostly always also do B&F work as well.
Please note that public debt issuance is often more complex than private placement of NCDs and comes with undercutting to stay ahead of the competition.
Now that I am 11 years into financing at a tier 1 firm, my advice is to stick with a B&F team and not such a sub-specialized vertical within B&F; to avoid the monotony of templated work which DCM entails.
According to me, it's not advisable to specialise in something this niche if you are early on in your career.
DCM is not the same as ECM even though there might be some overlap. Billing wise it's the same as B&F and better than ECM i would say
Billing available on stock exchange website - search for debt offer documents. In key information document - law firm fees are disclosed. Ranges from 10 to 15 L.
Contractual provisions similar to B&F - debenture trust deeds also available on stock exchange websites.
I don’t mean in terms of student elections (since NLUs don’t have such organised political elections) but in terms of general ideology and student activities. At NLUs, I would say Gen X and Gen Y were more Marxist, but Gen Z is heavily Marxist-Leninist-Ambedkarite.
As I understand it, the Marxist faction at JNU is Bengali and Malayali -dominated, plus draws people from urban India and English-speaking backgrounds. It is cosmopolitan and internationalist, and pays more attention to class than caste. They pay a lot of attention to theory. They look up to Gramsci, Althusser, Spivak etc and see the subaltern as dominated by capitalist exploitation. The Marxist-Leninist-Ambedkarite faction is Bihar-UP-Telangana backward caste dominated, plus mostly rural students. It is is radical and regional, since casteism has historically been dominant in these states and in rural India. They look up to people like Periyar, Kanshi Ram, Lalu Yadav etc and believe in confrontation and earthy language, giving more attention to praxis than theory. They see English-language writings on class as capital as elitist. We got a demo of this during the infamous Gayatri Spivak lecture at JNU, when she scolded a Dalit student from Bihar for not pronouncing DuBois correctly. He gave it back to her on X, calling her a “Brahmin bh and b**d” and pointing to her caste privilege. Prof Ajay Gudavarthy explained the issue in The Wire.
https://m.thewire.in/article/caste/the-gayatri-spivak-controversy-exploring-the-implosion-of-subalternity-in-public-discourse/amp
But their Chandigarh practice is Tax only.
Also the management and faculty are decent and are earnest (though quite old school in terms of strict attendance requirements, unnecessary disciplinary norms, etc).