The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : NLUs, a preferred recruitment destination

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Mar 12, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

NLUs, a preferred recruitment destination

Special Correspondent

Law students can now look to high-paying international postings Clifford Chance, one of the world's leading law firms, and SJ Berwin, a pan-European law firm, showed keen interest in the recruitment process at NUJS this year.

The National Law Universities (NLUs) have for some years now established themselves as a preferred employment destination for top recruiters in the country. No longer are the IITs and the IIMs the only destinations that the best and the highest-paying recruiters look towards when they seek the most talented bunch in the country. The who's-who of corporate India has been recruiting students directly from the NLU campuses, for positions and responsibilities that are the same as, and for pay that is equal to, the best management and engineering institutions.

Recently, however, a new trend seems to have taken hold: not only are the top Indian recruiters heading to the NLUs, even international recruiters have been recruiting students directly off campus from the NLUs.

This year looks no different, if the recently concluded recruitment of the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata (NUJS), one of the top three NLUs, is anything to go by.

Clifford Chance, one of the world's leading law firms with 28 offices in 20 countries (www.cliffordchance.com) , and SJ Berwin, a pan-European law firm (www.sjberwin.com) , showed keen interest in the recruitment process at NUJS this year.

Amarchand Mangaldas, one of India's biggest corporate law firms, picked up 27 candidates for its offices around the country. AZB and Partners, J. Sagar and Associates, Trilegal, Luthra and Luthra, and ELP, among the most respected corporate law firms in the country, also recruited students.

The securities markets regulator, SEBI, also recruited 20 students, not to mention players such as ICICI and Infosys (which has been recruiting from NUJS for the past three years now), who were also present. Some students, however, did not take up all the lucrative jobs on offer, but chose NGOs or took up judicial clerkships.

Some were also selected for courses at the New York University and the London School of Economics.

This radical shift in employment options available to Indian law students, from traditional avenues such as litigation to high-paying international corporate law postings, has been one big fallout of the National Law University system that came to being in 1987.

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