Dear Sir,
India Business Law Journal fills a long-felt void in the Indian legal market. Each issue is informative and thought provoking.
The guide to India’s legal market published in your July/August issue is of particular interest, not just to practitioners and students aspiring to practise law but also to the consumers of legal services.
The clients are savvy and demanding; they need to know the market conditions and how the service providers will gear up to meet client needs.
While the market burgeons, though there is anecdotal evidence of a slowdown, challenges loom large. Yet, the entry of international law firms is not a threat but an opportunity.
These firms have been around for years and their full presence will inevitably lead to improved skills and a rise in standards.
Ranking high among the challenges are a lack of product consistency by Indian law firms, meeting the expectations of clients and lawyers and the state of the justice delivery system.
Work from the same law firms is often inconsistent in quality. It is not enough to provide young lawyers with templates. Properly instilled skill sets and knowledge-bases are essential to ensuring a consistent work product and client satisfaction. We need to address that.
Expectations are a two way street. Aspiring lawyers look for rewards in terms of money and job satisfaction. Partners who hire young lawyers also have expectations.
Expectations include quality of work, work ethos, ethics and so on. The partners, preoccupied with meeting juniors’ expectations, omit to convey their expectations to the juniors. Partners’ expectations from juniors, if articulated, are lost in translation.
The practice of law operates within the justice delivery system, which needs to be efficient and predictable. How well that system works is the collective responsibility of the executive, the judiciary and equally important, of the practitioners. The system, creaking under a huge case overload, is unpredictable, partially because of the absence of quality controls. We lawyers need ongoing education. On-the-job learning and in-house training sessions need to be supplemented. The Institute of Chartered Accountants has made continuing education programmes mandatory. The Bar Council has just thought about it.
The prevailing good times are the opportune moment to bring about improvements. After all, hay is made while the sun shines.
MP Bharucha
Partner
Bharucha & Partners
Mumbai
India Business Law Journal welcomes your letters. Please write to the editor at editorial@indilaw.com. Letters may be edited for style, readability and length, but not for substance. Due to quantity of letters we receive, it is not always possible to publish all of them.
