IndusLaw may have been growing leaps and bounds, including by recently breaking into the cozy top-tier capital markets club and having been one of the more aggressive lateral hirers in recent times, but the firm’s starting salary had somewhat lagged behind compared to the highest-paying firms.

L&L Partners has paid an unexpected additional bonus of 7% of annual 2020-21 financial year fixed remuneration of non-fresher and non-litigation associates.

Three-partner firm Spice Route Legal, which had been founded in 2016 by former K Law partner Praveen Raju, has revealed its remuneration for associates from 0 to 7 years of post-qualification experience (PQE).

Nishith Desai Associates (NDA) has revised its base pay for freshers to Rs 17.4 lakh, including a guaranteed annual bonus of Rs 1.2 lakh, from the previous total level of around Rs 15 lakh, which had last been revised around four years ago.

T alwar Thakore & Associates (TTA) has frozen its fee-earner salaries at current levels without increments, while partners have said they would be reducing their drawings. According to a statement from the firm we had requested: “The partners have taken a number of prudent protective measures g...

Khaitan & Co equity partners and executive directors have taken a 20% cut on their take-home pay, reported Bar & Bench today, but without any adjustments of more junior staff or lawyers’ salaries. We have reached out to Khaitan for comment. Update 17:03: Executive director HR, Amar Sinhji ...

The hope is that with this somewhat painful move now, future pain can be avoided (though of course no one knows how bad it’s going to get)**

Top advocate-on-record (AOR) and Supreme Court powerhouse Agarwal Law Associates (ALA), which has around 50 lawyers, has announced a cut in fee-earner salaries of 30% on those earning more than Rs 40,000 per month at least until 14 April, after closure of the courts and social distancing measures have caused court work to fall off a cliff.

Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas has paid out bonuses to fee-earners yesterday, this year around a week earlier than usual, due to the national COVID-19 lockdown.

Nishith Desai Associates (NDA) has reversed its salary freeze that we had first reported in June, giving annual salary increments to fee-earners with retrospective effect.

Nishith Desai Associates (NDA) had circulated an internal email announcing a salary freeze for mid-level associates and above, due to the firm having experienced “stagnancy in the revenue growth for 2019”.

In 2017, we witnessed high levels of hiring activity in general corporate and M&A space across levels. Other transactional areas such as banking, capital markets and structured finance were busier than the previous years, but hiring at the mid-level especially was limited to replacing leavers rather than growing that practice area. The litigation market remained steady and so did other practice areas like IPR, taxation and competition law.

However, this is still lower than what judges had been paid in real terms in 1957, as we and Mint had reported in 2015.

The Indian legal talent market remains buoyant as we move through 2017 and we see strong hiring activity continuing across both private practice firms and in-house legal teams. This positivity can be attributed to the fact that Indian industry has witnessed a steady rise over the past few years in terms of productivity, expansion and revenue.

Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas (SAM) is offering multiple campus recruits base pay below the Rs 15-16 lakh fixed package that it had promised to students and announced to media in a record hike in 2015, that had placed the firm near the top of the fresher salary table.

The pay hike would take apex and high court judges roughly back to the levels they had been paid in 1957 (adjusted for inflation), according to an analysis of decreasing salaries we had published in Mint in 2015 with Alok Prasanna Kumar (see graphic above).

The range of salaries at India’s law firms is wider than ever, with a 10-year PQE (post qualification experience) lawyer on remuneration (including bonuses) potentially ranging all the way from Rs 25 lakh per annum to Rs 200 lakh, according to salary data from four legal recruitment consultants compiled by Legally India.

“If I had opted to be a junior to some lawyer and enter the legal profession, I would have got only a pittance for the many initial years. But I learnt that driving trucks meant instant wages,” law graduate Yogita Raguvanshi told The Hindu in a fascinating profile.

Counting the Rs 40.4 lakh of fees paid to 10 lawyers for 151 cases, Ignoring the higher fees paid to the two highest paid lawyers, that works out to a mathematical average of only Rs 2,675 per case.

The post colonial-era building with the red sandstone dome on Delhi’s Bhagwaan Dass Road is home to an elite class of lawyers, who are likely to be the most expensive in the world: they are typically paid between Rs 5 and 15 lakh per hearing.

Interviews by Legally India with more than 32 Delhi lawyers who brief seniors in the Supreme Court and Delhi high court reveal all…