NUJS Kolkata, which continues to maintain an omerta over its campus recruitment figures and declined to confirm, deny or otherwise speak about Day Zero recruitment figures citing long-standing “policy”, has so far received possibly up to 84 job offers from nine domestic law firms, including more than 20 PPOs.
There were also four offers from ICICI Bank, while three probably secured vacation schemes with foreign law firms.
This would mean that probably around 60 out of a batch of 115 or so LLB students graduating next year could already hold accepted job offers.
Admittedly, our numbers have been stitched together from an amalgamation of several sources and accounts and are not authoritative.
The NUJS recruitment committee declined to confirm, deny or correct our figures, saying: “As per our policy, we don’t disclose our figures till the 5th year ends.”
In any case, the numbers will be a relief to a small minority who may have feared that the student protests resulting in the ouster of vice chancellor (VC) Ishwara Bhat, which had reached a crescendo just before Day Zero, would have negatively affected recruitments.
One tipster (with due hat-tip to all who wrote in): “As for when the CRC lets you know about them officially, it’s their call. But personally, I think NUJS can use some good press for the right reasons.”
Nearly 20 offers from AZB
According to several disparate sources, including a large number of anonymous leaks by NUJS students of offers made, AZB & Partners has made a possibly unprecedented number of Day Zero offers ever made by any single recruiter to a national law school - 19.
Cyril Amarchand Mangldas and Trilegal too made a huge number of offers to Noojies, tied in second place with 14 offers each.
IndusLaw and ICICI Bank each made four offers, Luthra & Luthra and Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas each made three offers and Khaitan & Co and Talwar Thakore & Associates (TTA) made one offer each on Day Zero.
J Sagar Associates (JSA) gave out one PPO.
Our information does not include reliable figures for acceptances - information that the RCC guards zealously and that individual students who leaked us information don’t necessarily have access to.
We are also not completely confident in the accuracy of offers made for each firm, and have not confirmed these with law firms this year, unlike in previous years.
The policy not to disclose Day Zero results has been fairly long-standing at NUJS, with the reasoning having in the past been that due to its large batch size, the NUJS RCC does not want to discourage other recruiters from coming to campus after a large number of students have already been recruited.
Estimates and amalgamation of NUJS Day Zero job offers
| Firms | Total Acceptances | Day Zero + Day One offers | Maximum range of Day Zero, Day One plus PPO offers | No. of PPOs | Accepted Vacation Schemes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AZB & Partners | ? | 19 | 20 | ? | |
| Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas | ? | 14 | 18 | ? | |
| Khaitan and Co. | ? | 1 | 3 | 2 | |
| Luthra & Luthra Law Office | ? | 3 | 8 | ? | |
| Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas | ? | 3 | 8 | ? | |
| Trilegal | ? | 14 | 16 | ? | |
| Takwar Thakore & Associates | ? | 1 | 2 | ? | |
| IndusLaw | ? | 4 | 4 | ? | |
| JSA | ? | 0 | 1 | 1 | |
| ICICI | ? | 4 | 4 | ||
| Foreign Vacation Schemes | 3 | 3 | |||
| Total | 55 - 60ish | 64ish | 84ish | 20ish | 3 |
A total of 63 offers were made on and after Day Zero, which is a lead over Nalsar’s 35 offers, NLSIU’s 25 offers, NLU Jodhpur’s and NLU Delhi’s 15 offers each.
Comments
I heard the ex-VC had some exchange program in place which the students were protesting about?
My friend thats some awesome stuff that you are smoking if it makes you think SB and KR are "scamming" the university. Mind telling me where it's sold? I could do with a nice trip too.
Their appointments are irregular. KR got recruited as asst prof when he had neither LLM nor NET (both mandated by UGC). His appointment is not even approved by the Executive Council.
He was only there by the grace of the hon'ble ex-Vice Chancellor. No doubt he cried and cribbed when students asked for Bhat resignation.
This just exposes the shallow mentality of students like you. It is a myth that you want NLU alumni and good people to teach. You are happy with mediocre people like "Rather Particular" because they shower marks. I saw a comment elsewhere suggesting Sudhir Krishnaswamy and Shubhankar Dam as the next VC. LOOOOOL. They will be 10 times as strict as the people you are criticising --- they will fail students for shoddy work and expel students for plagiarism.
Kian, I urge you to please do a recruitment ranking soon and share it with MSM and also submit it to NAAC.
1) Reduction in intake = the figures look even better
2) Improvements in infrastructure, better faculty = better student performance and motivation
3) Better admin, better funding = sky is the limit
1) NLSIU, NALSAR and NLUD remain ahead in CLAT preferences, NIRF rankings and the public perception. Placements and student quality alone will not help. Better leadership, infrastructure, finances, faculty, research output and brand image is needed. Here, NUJS has fallen behind. Just look at the website of NUJS for a start. It is awful. Unless you get a top class VC you will remain handicapped.
2) Placement percentage is also important. Because of the large batch size 100% may not get placements. Average salary is also ultimately the most important, not the median.
3) Law firm placements is just one part of the picture. What about prestigious global companies like McKinsey and Goldman Sachs?
4) Foreign law firm offers should be one of the major deciding factors.
5) LLM offers are also important. How many offers in the top 10/top 20 law schools of the world? Any Rhodes, Chevening scholars?
6) One must also measure success outside law firm starting salaries. Look at the star alumni of NLS --- Senior Advocates, Judges, UN officials, professors at Oxford at Ivy League colleges, two winners of the Infosys Prize, founders of major law firms.... So how many original thinkers and true achievers are graduating, instead of glorified clerks?
7) Moots are also important for the college's reputation.
You can downvote me, but it is the truth. I am a well-wisher.
1. Apart from NIRF Ranking, NLUD is yet to cross NUJS in any other form of perception. NLSIU and NUJS are fairly comparable in terms of faculty, as is NALSAR. Finance, yes. But students can hardly do much about that bit, nor can the VC.
2. No law school provides placement to 100% of the batch. All the data provided by RPCs saying only about 50% people opt for placement to begin with from all law schools are somewhat suspect, but assuming that is true, NUJS has always managed to provide jobs to those who sit for recruitment. Whether it is mean or median or any other metric, NUJS grads are not behind any Indian law school in terms of graduate salary. There is absolutely no evidence to show otherwise.
3. The two companies you mentioned do not usually recruit from elsewhere other than NLSIU. That's an advantage they have, undoubtedly. Here, RPC can think of a good strategy to convince them otherwise. Student quality is certainly comparable.
4. Again, NUJS students are not behind anybody in terms of foreign law firm offers. In fact, NLSIU has not had any for this batch at all as per LI reports. But I agree we should all start thinking about ways to bring more foreign firms to India beyond the one or two that do at present.
5. 4th year students cannot have LLM offers at present. But here too, NUJS students are not behind anybody. Last year itself, graduates and alumni have had a Rhodes and Chevening scholarship that I personally know of, maybe a few others too. On a regular basis, NLSIU beats others in terms of consistency though, I agree. The huge fees of NUJS does play a role here, compared to NLSIU. Students prefer getting a job, clearing the loans, and then going off for higher studies. This is why more alumni go for LL.M. every year than fresher graduates.
6. The list you mentioned is obviously disparate because of the 15 year headstart NLSIU has had so far. Since 2005, if you compare, the figures are not certainly too divergent, but then, not a lot of people become global experts in 13 years. Certainly no other NLU apart from NLSIU is ahead of NUJS in this matter. NALSAR is comparable. NLUD doesn't count, since it's way too young yet for this metric.
7. True. This is actually somewhere that students would love to improve upon, but so far they receive very little admin support. NUJS students have the potential to do much, much better, but finance becomes a huge problem, so does occasionally admin hurdles for attendance etc. Hopefully, this can improve with a better admin in the days to come.
Overall, I would say students form the biggest strength of this institution still. A little bit of support from admin would easily see the students going miles ahead in terms of future achievements. Even at this stage, they are not doing worse than anybody else and certainly doing better than most.
This shall be a systematic answer to all the 7 points raised by you.
1) In terms of CLAT preferences, NUJS remains securely above NLUD and chasing on NALSAR. NIRF rankings have so many faults that their credibility is doubtful if not shambolic. Public perception, as shown by the recruiters remains quite good of NUJS. This is not denying that a lot of things in NUJS need changing and hopefully a dynamic new VC should help. But by that standard, Venkat Rao and NLS have just started their way to a shambolic decline.
2) Placements: NUJS has always had 100% placements. Everyone who wants a job gets a job. Average salary remains well above both NALSAR and NLS. Follow analyst reports instead of NIRF and you'll know.
3)Global companies such as Goldman and McKinsey are consultancy firms which not very many law students are interested in but nonetheless, only NLS grads get hired there, that too sporadically. Give NUJS time, they'll get there as well.
4) Foreign law firm offers are as of this year more than both NLS and NALSAR.
5) We have students, from only the last batch in Harvard, Cambridge, LSE, Geneva, SOAS, etc. One student has won the Rhodes Scholarship. Not really lacking there.
6)It takes time to do these things. NLS was founded in 1988. NUJS in 2000. The only place where such a time gap can be ignored is in corporate law firms where progression is based on merit and less time. In that regard then, NUJS is doing really well.
7) This is the most arbitrary criteria ever. If moots are important, so are debates, so are sports. But if Sports were, then NUJS beat NLS and NALSAR in the tri series. If debates are then NUJS is easily the best debating law school in India right now. And even if moots are, the record this year across so many moots has been nothing short of exemplary.
NUJS has done fantastically well and its all down to the students despite many hindrances by the admin. no doubt there is still scope for improvement, but where i take offence with your comment is that it is an opinion based on misinformation. I suggest you correct your facts and then enter this debate again should you wish to.
Yours
V
That was headline worthy by itself.
Around 6 or 7 picked NUJS over NLUD while almost 20 picked NLUD over NUJS. 4 left for NLUD after joining NUJS.
I myself joined NUJS but the prefernce was definitely in favour of NLUD in 2017.
Yes NLUD placements are behind NUJS but we are getting better slowly and the preference for it will increase. Instead of trolling NLUD I urge my NUJS friends to wait for this year AILET and CLAT results :)
Your claims about teachers trying to suborn students in their 'camps' is arrant nonsense, but then your institute itself has shown that it is not beyond lying when it comes to currying favour or popularity including ranking, so why should students from there think twice before doing the same either? And you are referring to politics? Have you met your VC lately? That man, regardless of the many good qualities he has, invented politics! There are several of your faculty members who attest to that fact in open forum. By all means, beat your own drum if it suits you (as if being a humanities student gives anyone an inherent advantage when it comes to law or even the standard of social science taught in law schools; newsflash, it doesn't).
But the only problem with NLUD that everyone outside knows is that it always shows an unhealthy tendency to try to drag other institutions down in order to establish its own 'doubtful' superiority. If you are so good, then go ahead and prove it! Your institution has been recently trolled not because of its achievements, but because it has submitted false data, did not retract it when caught and still refuses to apologise for it. As simple as that. Plus, it tries to make profit at the cost of inconveniencing thousands of students every year in Shylockian manner. If you have been so well-taught about law and justice by the stellar faculty members that you usually boast of, why aren't you or them protesting against that?
I have no problem in admitting NLUD is getting better slowly. The operative word being slowly. As for us at NUJS, I think we are doing fine with the students who wish to come here and who will come here this year. If you are that interested in taking CLAT rank X, and if that person wishes to go for NLUD, let him/her do so. We will take Rank X+1 or X+100 and by the time he/she graduates from here, he/she would be equal to if not better than any law graduate in the country. That's what an institution should boast about, not about which fresh out of school student getting 0.5 marks more in an exam chooses to do before knowing anything about legal education.
[i] At some selective law schools, including some National Law Schools, faculty have a little more involvement. However, campus recruitment is primarily a student driven process at most of the highly selective National Law Schools. Additionally, some newer schools have involved their faculty in hiring to a greater extent. Most notably, Jindal Global Law School and its faculty and administration have aggressively pursued memorandums of understanding with law firms in India and abroad where their students might secure jobs.
[/i]
[i]One might speculate that some law teachers and administrators were likely hesitant to assist law firms in recruitment because of concerns that law firms might undermine student interest in public interest law..... Further, most law professors were not working in the areas of commercial and corporate law and were perhaps unlikely to think of career services for the law firm sector as part of what legal education is, or perhaps should be, about.
[/i]
[i] if law firms were to become sufficiently dissatisfied with the preparation that a school provided for corporate legal work they might decide to hire fewer students from that school. If this were to happen students would almost certainly begin heading to other schools and the law school may face a serious threat of declining student quality (or, worse still, not being able to fill all of its seats).This would likely lead it to provide students with the education (or at least improve their education) that they need to compete for jobs in corporate law firms.
[/i]
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2523027
I really hope you can do this.
Furthermore, NIRF tries to follow the global ranking model by looking at research quality, foreign collaborations etc (see the links below). Thus, even if NUJS tops in placements it has to ramp up its score in these parameters. The SJA must put pressure the admin for more tie-ups with foreign law schools. The SJA must also ask for an EC resolution directing faculty members to publish two articles every year in international journals indexed in SCOPUS (even EPW is indexed) and disclose the data annually. Currently there is no objective way to hold faculty members accountable. In fact, MP Singh and Shamnad tried to institute this rule, but Bhat overruled this.
GLOBAL RANKING OF LAW SCHOOLS:
https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2016/law-legal-studies
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2018/subject-ranking/law#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats
I really have never had anything against Noojies, but as I've said many times before, this policy is:
i) really annoying for us,
ii) pointless (since there are so many other ways of getting the information) and
iii) ultimately probably counterproductive (since the lack of confirmed data on acceptances is even worse from an RCC perspective)...
I for one would be very if future batches can reconsider this, though I don't hold out hope.
http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/handle/10603/137080
I heard they got 31 job offers- day zero
The only discernible difference at NUJS faculty seems to be the much worse faculty-student ratio, which is indeed much better at other NLUs. A part of that is because of funding, the rest because of administrative inefficiency. But otherwise, there are good people and bad people everywhere. I have been reading about this superiority of NLUD faculty everywhere for a long period of time. I have no doubt about that in terms of the research output they produce, actually. However, when it comes to teaching, are the students there getting all the possible benefits of that higher quality? If so, why aren't the graduates from there ostensibly better than the other NLUs? That's what makes me believe that while the faculty there undoubtedly improve the university profile in terms of research output and publications, when it comes to imparting the 'knowledge' to students, they are no more or less capable than the faculty at NLSIU, NALSAR or NUJS.
1) MOST IMPORTANT: The Supreme Court has sent a notice to all NLU VCs asking if they can be given Institution of National Importance status like IITs and IIMs. Some time ago, NLSIU, NALSAR and NUJS students had issued a joint statement supporting this. This effort must now be revived and the Acting VC be requested to push for it.
2) The website must be revamped. The SJA website must be transported to the official website and further improved to make it the best website of all the NLUs.
3) The SJA needs to push for implementation of the review commission recommendations, especially on faculty and infrastructure.
4) An effort needs to be made to attract private funding. The library, auditorium, special lecture rooms, hostels and research centres all need to be renamed in honour of lawyers/firms/companies that donate money. Research chairs names after donors also need to be established and new, qualified faculty paid salaries from these endowments. This is the case everywhere else.
1) In terms of resume, the most competent profs at NUJS were the first three VCs themselves + a set of Menon recruits (Vikramjeet Banerjee, Shiju, D Banerji, retired judges etc) + a set of MP Singh recruits (Shamnad, Sudhir, Prabhash, Pritam etc). Chimni's record was mixed.
2) Not all the profs above have been good in terms of articulation and inspiring students in class, but everyone above undoubtedly had knowledge of his/her subject and were good researchers. Overall, this makes them "good" teachers, not "bad" teachers. At least they can be called "semi-good" if they do only of research or teaching well.
3) The "bad" teachers are those who lack knowledge of the subject, are poor researchers, cannot articulate well, cannot inspire students. In other words, useless at everything. I would also put PIB in this category, as his research is nothing noteworthy. No publications in leading international journals, and books which are bland and descriptive, rather than advancing new theories.
4) As far as qualifications go, in MOST cases people with the NLU degree + foreign degree combination tend to fall in the "good"/"semi-good" category, but there are examples of people from lesser known colleges falling in the "good"/"semi-good" category. Similarly, "bad" teachers tend to be graduates of obscure colleges and not NLUs in MOST cases.
5) Some "bad" teachers are popular as they buy student loyalty with high grades. This is a trend started by Prof Particular. Despite what students say, these profs are "bad" and will remain "bad".
6) Due to a talent crunch and low pay scales, there have always been "bad" profs since Menon's time. All NLUs have "bad" profs.
However, a VC's legacy should be measured by how many "good" teachers joined despite these obstacles. In this regard, PIB's legacy has been terrible. All the "good" teachers left, the "bad" ones remained, and newer "bad" ones joined. In the brain drain to NLUD, Jindal etc, all the profs who left were in the "good" category and not the "bad" category. PIB shamelessly indulged in nepotism to keep "good" profs out. Here, MP Singh fared better as he attracted "good" teachers through incentives, regardless of caste or community.
7) On this basis, PIB was a terrible VC and the others were much better. No one can question this, despite the existence of "bad" profs during Singh, Menon and Chimni's time. We are taking about the ratio of "bad" versus "good", not the complete absence of "bad".
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/students-of-premier-law-schools-seek-national-importance-tag/articleshow/58249106.cms
https://www.legallyindia.com/lawschools/nls-nalsar-nujs-student-councils-unite-under-groundbreaking-manifesto-that-could-make-every-single-nlu-better-if-successful-20170414-8449
2) August 2017: Prof Sugata Bose, Harvard professor and Trinamool Congress MP, introduces Bill in Parliament:
https://www.legallyindia.com/home/dsnlu-student-drafted-nlu-bill-now-introduced-in-lok-sabha-for-national-importance-status-to-nlus-20170804-8706
3) April 2018: Supreme Court gives notice to all NLUs on whether this status can be conferred:
http://www.livelaw.in/national-law-schools-institutes-national-importance-sc-asks-asg-hearing-prof-shamnad-basheers-petition/
https://barandbench.com/national-law-universities-institutes-national-importance/
In fact, it should not be surprising that we get very mediocre faculty. I have been looking at the salary range of lawyers on LI and I couldn't help but wonder -- what makes people give up these sorts of salaries to work for pittance at NLUs or even abroad. I'm talking of the toppers really. Plenty of them have joined academia inIndia and abroad. And I really wonder why on earth are they doing this?
a) Forming close links with the cream of lawyers in Calcutta and inviting them for guest lectures --- real good people , not c***** people promoted by faculty/admin.
b)Guest lectures by practitioners outside Calcutta who may have family in Calcutta and visit often
c) Forming links with the cream of academicians in India and inviting them for short courses. Sponsor airfare and accommodation if necessary.
Such ideas were, in fact, proposed to PIB but he resisted as he is very insecure and only wants to promote his own people.
I agree with all other suggestions you have made, by the way. I heard Upendra Baxi is coming to NUJS as the next Chair Professor? That ought to attract some more talent, shouldn't it?