If you ask any senior lawyer at the bar on how to build a practice at the Supreme Court, here’s what they will say.
Beta, first build a practice in the district courts. You must learn how to conduct trials.
Once you have enough district court work, you can start doing some matters at the High Court.
Eventually, one day, when you are successful in high court already and many of your clients appeal to the SC, you can move your practice to the Supreme Court.
This is a 20 year plan that does not materialise for more than 1% of lucky lawyers though.
Anyway once you are successful in a court and making great money, uprooting yourself and moving cities and starting from scratch is a terrible commercial decision.
The new generation of successful lawyers in the Supreme Court today did not graduate to the Supreme Court through that process.
I went to NUJS, and I had half a dozen of my batchmates join the Supreme Court on Day 1. They all started out as juniors to good Supreme Court counsels. Nobody told them go back to your local district court and start from there.
Absolutely all of them became AORs in just 5-6 years, basically as soon as they could, and today enjoy thriving practices in the SC.
However, if you are outside a certain circle, you would hear this stupid 20 year plan preaching and immediately get dissuaded from thinking of building a practice at the Supreme Court.
This dissuading effect is very nice for seniors for various reasons, not so good for you.
If you believe this, you would have no option but to find a senior at the trial courts and High Court in the hope of learning the ropes while you get paid next to nothing, with no end of the tunnel in sight.
The biggest problem with this strategy is that most juniors earn below minimum wage, work 12+ hours a day, without any training or certainty about when they will be able to earn a decent living wage.
Very few lawyers are able to survive this grind, if at all.
Yet, nobody questions this antiquated way. Why not start at the Supreme Court right away?
The old, antiquated, fossilised method was conceptualised a few decades back, and it became a myth. It has been propagated over generations, surviving the test of time and even structural changes in the legal profession.
It survived only for one reason – it comes from seniors, and we tend to follow advice of the senior members of the profession, even if it is against our interest.
After all, aren’t they more knowledgeable and learned, having seen much more of the legal profession in comparison to us?
While this argument holds merit when it comes to senior’s knowledge of the law and court craft, when it comes to advice regarding your career, modern day reality and demand-supply economics tell us a different story.
Here are 5 major things that have changed the game as far as building a Supreme Court practice is concerned:
- Lawyers outside of Delhi also can become Advocate on Record as long as they maintain an office and a clerk (shared also works) in Delhi
- You can do all Supreme Court filing and registry work online now. It is also possible to appear and argue online in the Supreme Court!
- You can travel to Delhi at a short notice by a quick flight, air travel is cheap and commonplace now unlike what it was 30 years back.
- Number of cases before the SC has drastically increased, and the number of AORs have been controlled through a very tough exam. While trial courts and High Courts are hyper competitive and very crowded, the Supreme Court has lesser competition by miles if you become an AOR. There is no such exam based AOR system in other courts.
- You can now get clients from anywhere in the country – because clients can find you on the internet and they trust quality signals on the internet more than recommendations of their neighbours or cousins. It is no more true that your appellate clients need to come from a single high court.
Things have changed very fast in the last few years.
This makes it possible for trial and district court lawyers to build a Supreme Court practise without having to wait to establish themselves even in their local forum or in the High Court.
In fact, doing some matters at the Supreme Court in the early years, and joining the exclusive club of AORs once you complete 5 years, gives you an advantage in your local litigation practice as well, apart from multiplying your earnings from occasional Supreme Court work.
The good news is that the preparation for the AOR Exam itself deepens your knowledge of precedent, superior drafting skills and procedural acumen if you do it in the right manner. These skills can get you noticed before the bench at the lower courts as well.