What is the most attractive, glamorous, well-paid profession as a lawyer?
There are a lot of options. However, in college, I knew only one. Getting a corporate law job at a top law firm was considered the most attractive career option after graduation.
Forget college, even school students appearing for CLAT know how much which corporate law firm pays to freshers! Even before law aspirants get into law school, they hear stories about how big law firms pay fresh graduates INR 1.5 lakh per month.
Which is why many people aspire to be a corporate lawyer.
They want the jobs that pay well, raise their prestige and social profiles, give them an opportunity to work with top clients, and provide financial security.
And since mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and investments are the cream of corporate law, it is understandable that they are highly prized segments of the legal profession. Which is why we are holding a bootcamp on it, but more on that later.
Not only law students but a lot of litigators also want to switch to corporate law firms if given a choice. There are also judges and IAS officers who have left their jobs and joined corporate law firms.
How can you get such a job?
That is the wrong question to ask.
For the right solution, we must ask the right questions. So, your first question should rather be: What work do corporate lawyers do?
This may lead to further questions like:
- What would a day in a corporate law firm look like?
- Who will I report to? What does the hierarchy look like?
- What would it take for me to survive and succeed at the job? What would it take to grow in such a job?
- How will my responsibilities change over time within a corporate law firm?
- Who would be my clients and what would they expect from me?
These are important questions to ask and find answers to. And this can be Step 1 for you to start exploring the questions as well as the answers.
Read on if you:
- Want to work as a corporate lawyer
- Want to switch to corporate law from litigation
- Are planning to appear for a corporate law interview in future
Before we delve into corporate law work at law firms, let us look at the different types of law firms available to you.
What are the different kinds of law firms?
Full-service v. Boutique: Full-service law firms provide service across all practice areas of law. These are generally big firms, though small firms can be full-service too. Some well-known examples are Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, Khaitan, Trilegal, Fox & Mandal, etc.
Boutique law firms are limited to one or more highly specialised practice areas. Usually, they are not as big as full-service law firms, and their unique selling point is their expertise in one or two specific areas. They often add additional practice areas when they become sufficiently successful in one practice area.
Some of them even try to become full-service later. However, remaining a boutique is not a bad business strategy. Sometimes boutique practices are overall small but highly profitable and margins are a lot better than full-service law firms. This is why large law firms are always on the lookout to acquire highly profitable boutique practices.
Notable boutique firms include AK Law (dispute resolution), Remfry & Sagar (intellectual property), Ikigai Law (technology), etc. Boutique law firms may even charge more than well known full-service law firms as the price for their special expertise.
Tier-1, Tier-2, etc: It is a common practice to classify law firms as tier-1, tier-2, tier-3 etc, and we do not quite know where the tiers end. Are there tiers 4, 5, 6 or 7? Hard to tell, as there is no reliable data. Beyond tier-1 and tier-2, things are quite unclear.
Which tier a law firm belongs to is a matter of market perception, as profits or revenues of law firms are unknown in India unlike say in the UK. So the market perception of how elite or successful a law firm is will often be formed by salaries paid to retainers (especially at entry-level because the rest is not transparent), team size, how many locations they serve, the volume of deals handled etc.
Some law firms are widely considered to be tier-1 law firms. Others are not considered tier-1 though they may claim that they are tier-1 in a specific practice area.
There are some law firm guides that provide such rankings too, but they are highly suspect because they accept money from firms they are ranking, and no matter how much they claim that their rankings are objective, when you delve deeper it’s hard to be convinced.
I feel that campus placement and salary paid to freshers have a lot to do with how the myth of tier-1 spreads in the market. For example, is an IndusLaw or NDA tier-1 law firm? Why not? I suspect if they start hiring from top NLU campuses on day zero and pay slightly more than what other law firms considered tier-1 are paying, they will be considered tier-1 as well in a matter of a few years.
We saw this happening with Trilegal and JSA between 2008 and 2015.
However, paying those salaries/ retainer fees at entry level will require law firms to pay even more to senior lawyers, which is difficult unless the economics supports it. So it is perhaps not such a bad indicator of how well a law firm is doing.
Is it possible to move from a small firm to a big firm later?
Starting your career with a smaller law firm is great as long as you get to do good work with a good boss. What kind of senior you work with is more important in my book.
Are your seniors respected for their work, are they proud of what they do? Do they have high standards? Do they have a vision? If not, I will worry about you even if you work in a famous law firm.
It is possible to move from a small law firm to a bigger one. Good professionals often switch from smaller firms to bigger firms as large law firms want to attract talent from smaller firms with more money.
However, there are some things to consider.
Working at a bigger law firm is no guarantee of success. Smaller law firms might allow you to develop your own brand and be more supportive if you build your own clientele. A big law firm often works to prevent that from happening because they are afraid that you will walk away with their clients.
You are more likely to make more money if you own your brand and your own clients in the long run, whether you work at a large law firm or a smaller one.
A young partner in a smaller law firm with his or her own clientele, business development responsibility and reputation makes more money than his/her counterparts in big law firms who do not have those things.
What are the different practice areas in a corporate law firm?
Here are the prominent practice areas of corporate law. Corporate law practice usually refers to transactional law practice and does not include areas like corporate litigation, insolvency and bankruptcy, or niche areas like insurance and intellectual property.
General Corporate, M&A and Investment: Most well-known and profitable transactional practice, dealing with transactions such as mergers and acquisitions, takeovers, joint ventures, etc. The same team can also be looking at investment transactions, working on investment deals such as capital investments by private equity firms, venture capitalists, strategic investors, etc.
Banking and Finance: This area of practice deals with debt finance and lending transactions. Usually, large law firms have big banking and finance teams working on numerous term loans and financing deals. They also handle securitization or debt restructuring. Growth of the economy requires growth in credit, and banking law as a practice area has a very bright future.
Projects: Projects practice in a law firm deals with large infrastructure projects like the construction of highways, airports, power plants etc. Bigger projects involve a lot of structuring and multiple transaction documents. For example, if a flyover is being constructed, it may be done through a public-private partnership and so the law firm may need to facilitate the formation of a new entity, draft concession agreements, and so on.
A number of different permissions or approvals are often required for a project from a multitude of regulators and government departments. The lawyers in this team assist in securing such permissions as well.
Project Finance: Such big projects as we discussed above need financing from banks, NBFCs, government, and private financial institutions. Project finance lawyers take care of all transactions related to securing finance for infrastructure projects.
Funds Formation: This involves setting up and compliance for alternative investment funds or hedge funds, angel funds etc which invest in various ventures. These funds raise investments from a set of limited partners and then invest in different companies to earn returns from the increase in the value of such companies. Fund formation is a specialised area within law firms. With the growth of PE and VC industries, this is rising in prominence within corporate practices.
Capital markets: This involves helping companies that are raising money from the public through an IPO, qualified placement of securities or debenture issues. Capital markes lawyers draft offer documents, negotiate with investment banks, work with bankers to obtain approval from various external parties such as regulators, listing agencies, and rating agencies and make submissions to regulators including the Securities and Exchange Board of India for companies that are to be listed on a stock exchange or listed companies issuing further securities.
Only the largest few law firms tend to have a capital markets team.
Join our Diploma Course in M&A, Institutional Finance and Investment Laws (PE and VC transactions).
For more useful updates on this and other subjects, please also join our Telegram channel.