Law schools and admissions, law firms and Big Law, clerkships, litigation practice and in-house roles in India and the United States: who is hiring, what it pays, and how to get in.
Fewer questions, more time per passage and two new NLUs in the counselling round. The normalisation formula for the two sittings is published for the first time.
By Meera Iyer, Careers editor
The new exam drops most memorised rules for skills-based tasks. Schools are rewriting first-year curricula to match, and applicants are asking which states will accept it.
By Meera Iyer, Careers editor
Data protection, insolvency and disputes are hiring at a premium. Capital markets and real estate are quietly shrinking. Salary bands from six firms, compared.
By Meera Iyer, Careers editor
Regional and mid-sized firms cannot match the Cravath scale, so they are selling a lower billable target, earlier client contact and a clearer path to partnership.
By Meera Iyer, Careers editor
Advisory work on foreign law and international arbitration is in. Court appearances, Indian-law opinions and property work are out. The fly-in, fly-out limit is 60 days.
By Arjun Mehta, Legal affairs correspondent
Year-end bonuses match last year's scale at every class level. The new wrinkle is whether hours saved by AI tools count toward the threshold.
By Meera Iyer, Careers editor
The stipend is up, the written test is back, and the interview is where most candidates fall. Former clerks on what worked.
By Meera Iyer, Careers editor
Most circuits are now hiring after the second year of law school. A handful of judges still hire first-years in the spring, and students are still taking those offers.
By Rachel Okafor, US courts correspondent
The point-based system is gone, the interview stays, and the full court votes by secret ballot. Twenty-two designations this round, four of them women.
By Arjun Mehta, Legal affairs correspondent
Fourth-year associates who have never taken a deposition are trading the scale for stand-up work. Boutiques say applications have doubled.
By Meera Iyer, Careers editor
Pay has risen faster in-house than at firms for three years running. So has the share of GCs who say data protection now takes more of their week than contracts.
By Meera Iyer, Careers editor
Contract automation, spend analytics and AI tooling have created a job that did not exist a decade ago. Most of the people in it are not lawyers.
By Nikhil Rao, Legal technology correspondent