Corporate law firms have raised demands regarding legal education. Now they should play a greater role in shaping it, argues Jonathan Gingerich of the University of California
Corporate law firms have emerged as a small but economically important part of the Indian legal sector in the past 20 years. These firms are seeking lawyers with different skill sets than those typically possessed by elite lawyers prior to the liberalization of India’s economy. Particularly, in order to satisfy the demands of clients, Indian corporate law firms are keen to employ lawyers who can conduct rigorous legal research, write clear legal prose, and work on teams with other lawyers. Rather than hiring experienced lawyers, firms turn to fresh law school graduates.
Corporate law firms tend to have relatively little involvement with law schools. Several firms express an interest in stronger participation and believe that these institutions provide inadequate preparation for complex corporate legal work, but many have no direct involvement aside from conducting on-campus recruitment. As a result, the impact of corporate law firms on law schools has, so far, been indirect.
The primary mechanism through which these firms have impacted legal education is in changing the perception of the profession from low-paying and unattractive to lucrative and glamorous. Corporate law firms have raised demands regarding legal education and law schools have responded to this in different ways.
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Legacy law schools associated with historically prestigious public universities, such as the Delhi Law Faculty, face significant institutional rigidity and largely retain the same curricula that they have used for decades. Students typically receive minimal instruction in legal writing and research and student assessment consists almost entirely of final exams.
With the possible exception of Government Law College Mumbai, the graduates of top legacy schools are much less likely to secure jobs with law firms than are the graduates of national law schools. Successful legacy schools such as Delhi Law Faculty instead provide a gateway to a successful career in litigation and to positions as judges in the lower courts across the country. The impact of the growth of corporate law firms on legacy schools has been, in large part, to concentrate students who aspire to careers in litigation and the judiciary in such schools.
National law schools took hold as part of India’s legal education landscape with the opening of National Law School of India University (NLSIU) in 1987. Other national law schools followed in the late 1990s followed by many more in the 2000s. NLSIU broke with how legal education had previously been conducted. NLSIU incorporated significant legal research and writing requirements into its curriculum and required its students to undertake internships during their breaks. These curricular innovations were not designed to cater to the needs of law firms, however, combined with the school’s success in attracting high quality students, they made NLSIU graduates attractive to law firms as the legal market boomed in the late 1990s.
Today, a majority of students graduating from NLSIU, National Academy of Legal Studies and Research, National University of Juridical Sciences, and National Law University Jodhpur are able to snap up many of the available corporate legal jobs with law firms and in-house legal teams. However, as competition has emerged from younger national law schools and private law schools, the oldest and most established national law schools have responded by increasing their offerings in areas of law important to corporate legal practice and partnering with prestigious law firms to sponsor moot courts or send partners to teach compressed courses.
Many prospective law students aspire to careers with corporate law firms but only a small percentage are able to secure admission to a national law school. In response to this demand, a new breed of private law schools has surfaced in the past decade, aggressively jostling to position their students for jobs with corporate law firms in a bid to displace the handful of schools that presently dominate recruitment by corporate firms. Schools such as Jindal Global Law School (JGLS), Amity Law School, and Symbiosis Law School market themselves as more flexible and innovative than public law schools and therefore as better able to produce graduates with the skills demanded by the corporate legal sector.
JGLS, for instance, has tied up with foreign universities, signed agreements with international and Indian law firms to provide internships to students, and established a professional career services office, something that exists at few if any legacy law schools and national law schools.
As the number of private and national law schools continues to grow, we should expect to see increasing competition among them to groom and place their graduates with law firms. Many managing partners of law firms say that they want closer connections with law schools. In the coming years, they are likely to have the opportunity to develop such connections, however, they will need to devote more time and resources to relations with these institutions if they hope to more directly influence the shape of legal education in India.
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Jonathan Gingerich is a lawyer and a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles. He can be contacted at jgingerich@humnet.ucla.edu. This article is based on research he conducted with Nick Robinson as part of the Harvard Law School Program on the Legal Profession’s initiative on Globalization, Lawyers and Emerging Economies. Their findings are available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2398506.ucla.edu.
