Gingerich, J;
Robinson, N;
(2017)
Responding to the market: The impact of the rise of corporate law firms on elite legal education in India.
In: Wilkins, David B and Khanna, Vikramaditya S and Trubek, David M, (eds.)
The Indian Legal Profession in the Age of Globalization: The Rise of the Corporate Legal Sector and its Impact on Lawyers and Society.
(pp. 519-547).
Cambridge University Press
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Abstract
Corporate law firms have emerged in the past twenty years as a small but economically important and growing part of the Indian legal sector (Chapter 3 of this volume). Their growth has been driven by corporate clients who demand the legal services necessary to operate in the increasingly deregulated, privatized, and globalized Indian economy, including transactional legal services related to foreign direct investment, mergers and acquisitions, project finance, and other complex legal needs. To provide the services that their clients require to do business in a liberalized India, corporate law firms have sought lawyers with a different skill set than typical (elite) lawyers had before liberalization. While elite lawyers in India have traditionally tended to be skilled oral advocates who had established “face value” with judges that enabled them to effectively advance their clients’ positions in court (Chapter 14 of this volume on grand advocates), Indian corporate law firms have employed lawyers who can effectively conduct rigorous legal research, write clear legal documents and memos, interact with corporate clients, work on teams with other attorneys, meet deadlines, and speak and write polished English (Gingerich et al. 2014).To find lawyers with appropriate skills to meet client demand, law firms have generally not turned to lawyers from the practicing bar, but instead have hired newly minted law school graduates. Corporate firms offer high salaries even at the entry level, genteel work that avoids the rough and tumble of the courtroom, and the promise of relatively meritocratic recruitment and promotion. To many law students these incentives have helped make jobs at these new types of law firms more attractive than jobs available in the legal sector before liberalization. Yet, because law firms and the corporate legal sector more broadly were seeking a different type of lawyer than had traditionally practiced in India, the existing models of legal education in the country were not well prepared to meet this new development in the market.In this chapter we explore three impacts on legal education in India caused by the growing demand for corporate lawyers. First, we argue that the prospect of high-paying prestigious corporate work has changed who applies to law school, how these prospective students pick the law schools they attend, and how much they are willing to pay for their education.
| Type: | Book chapter |
|---|---|
| Title: | Responding to the market: The impact of the rise of corporate law firms on elite legal education in India |
| DOI: | 10.1017/9781316585207.016 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316585207.016 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10197500 |
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