One of the eligibility requirements to attempt the AOR Exam states that you must have trained with an AOR who has at least 10 years+ standing as an AOR for a period of 1 year.

Most lawyers do not know how they can obtain this certificate, especially if they are not based in Delhi or not practising at the Supreme Court. 

They do not know how to find AORs who have 10 years’+ experience, how to build relationships with them and how to obtain a commencement certificate. 

Many of them think that they will have to stop their district/High Court practice to train under them for 1 year. 

Remember that the training with an AOR is NOT some heavy duty, full-time 1-year internship or job. 

You do not need to relocate to Delhi, or abandon your practice at district courts or High Court and can continue your existing practise full-time. 

We help lawyers whom we professionally assist with some strategies that they can follow to obtain a commencement certificate.

We will show you the strategy here. It works very reliably. 

If you are a lawyer with 4 years’ or more of experience who needs to obtain a commencement certificate immediately, you can follow this.

However, even if you have less than 4 years’ experience, you can still follow this strategy and build relationships with AORs at the Supreme Court, so that later when you need to call in a favour and request a commencement certificate from one of them, it is easier to obtain.

For those of you who want to work as a junior to an AOR, this works great too.

Even if you are a law student, you can use it to get your first assignment or internship from them. 

The secret is to be genuine and try to help them with a few things.

You may need to visit Delhi a few times, offer to help them once in a while with their drafting or research, and once in a while you could refer a client from your state for a Supreme Court petition. 

Most AORs will be happy to help out if you have reached out and established some level of trust with them. We will show you how to do this. 

Although these things are not necessary and many people could get a certificate even without doing many of these things, we recommend that you do all of this. It will increase your chances and also build a stronger network for the future. 

Here is the problem that busy AORs face:

• As AoRs get experienced and build their network in the Supreme Court, given how few AoRs there are, they get supremely busy quite soon. 

• They have too much work and too little time in the day.

• On top of that retaining juniors over a long period of time is next to impossible as every junior wants to strike out on their own eventually and build their own practice.

• Very frequently, AoRs find that they have suddenly too much work, not enough bandwidth and have to turn people away.

• This is a great opportunity for those who are preparing for the AoR exam, can actually do the work or even those who are freshly qualified as AoR.

• You can do the drafting, research and other assisting work for the busy AoR on a freelance basis so that they do not have to say no to new clients even when their own bandwidth is jammed.

• This requires you to:

1. Learn the work
2. Network with those busy AoRs and demonstrate to them that you can deliver high quality of work which they expect

Here’s how to find them:

1. If you are immediately interested in finding an AOR with 10 years’ or more of standing, use the list here – it has 3041 AORs and is updated till 19.12.2022. It also contains their name, address, Registration number, mobile number and email id. 

2. Here is the updated list of AORs in alphabetical order as of 19/12/2022  (but it does not have their enrollment date). 

Both these lists have the Delhi address of the AORs, even if they are based outside Delhi. 

3. I recommend that you do not restrict yourself to lawyers with 10+ years standing exclusively. Especially if you are an intern or a junior lawyer.

Many of those junior AORs will know other AORs who have 10 years+ standing, and will be happy to introduce or recommend you to such senior AORs. 

4. You can also find senior officials of the SCAORA and reach out to them, even meet them personally and ask them for help. 

5. What if you want to find an AOR in your city? This is also possible, although not necessary. 

Type Advocate on Record on LinkedIn and filter by location – you may come across some AORs near you. 

Want a demo of these techniques?

We will show you everything in our free, 3-day live online bootcamp. Join us live.  

Here are a few other tips to keep in mind:  

• Initially, in order to get experience and testimonials when you are a beginner, do not hesitate to do free work. If you work for free, but very strategically, you can accelerate your career. 

• You can get 10x more matters before the SC, get a lot more experience and facetime before judges, build credibility and hands of expertise 10x faster, and basically get where you want to be 10 years faster than everyone else. Why?

• Remember – getting your first 3 assignments is always hardest. When you have a lot of testimonials and good reviews from top Supreme Court lawyers or genuine clients, work flows in faster than you can handle!

• Once you have done 3-5 assignments – whether paid or free, getting a paid client or a job suddenly becomes A LOT easier.

• By the end of your first month, your goal should be to have three-four testimonials and get your first paid gig.

• If you are a law student you can apply for internships with any of these lawyers. You will try to do the same thing. Earlier you do all these the better. 

• Don’t think that this can only be done by qualified lawyers. Law students can do ALL of these things. Only AoR exam you will appear for later – post 4 years of experience.

• What is the logic of waiting till you graduate when you can do it right away and get ahead of the crowd, start earning and also secure your future? If you want to make sure that you are financially independent by the time you graduate, if you want to ensure that you do not graduate without a job, then this is a solid path for you

What kind of message can you send them?  

What do you write to them?

Here is what to write. Send this message to at least 10 AORs who are practicing as AOR in SC: 

I am a young lawyer practicing in ______ courts in <location> and am preparing  for the AOR Exam myself. I am familiar with Supreme Court drafting, practice and procedure and leading cases. 

Assisting a successful Supreme Court litigator like you has been a dream for me. 

Can I help you with any of these:

• I can help you draft petitions like SLP, Transfer petition, Curative petition, etc. so that you can focus on more important aspects of the case for your clients

• I can help you with drafting applications for early hearing, application for interim relief, and other miscellaneous applications so that you can save more than 70% of your time spent on these, and you do not need to train me

• I can also help you with high-quality legal research for drafting and arguments in your matters, so that you can save hours in researching on legal propositions and precedents for your matters

• I can assist you to write and publish articles online, or assist you to compile your experiences and research into a book 

• I can also assist you to create amazing posts on Twitter and LinkedIn, get you invited to interviews online, to build your brand even further, if you are interested. 

I just want an opportunity to help you out using my skills. 

Please let me know if we can discuss this further. 

Here are some of my articles and drafts: <insert Google Drive/Dropbox link>

Remember that getting a yes with such a mail is not difficult, but you need to be able to deliver results after that. If you do a bad job when you get a chance, they won’t like that.

This works only if you can deliver results and not waste their time.

How can you ensure that you are in a position to deliver the results? 

You have to learn the work, of course.

If you are just starting out, you can also reach out to more recent AORs. They may be in more serious need of assistance.

Once you impress them, you can request them for introductions to AORs who have 10 years’ or more standing as AOR. 

Do this with several AORs, so that you build your network for the future as well. 

Are you feeling excited?

Are you going to try this out?

This will give you hands-on exposure in applying what you learn to practice, and fine-tune your preparation. 

Also, drafting and research work for Supreme Court matters is more rewarding and seniors will be willing to pay you if your work is good, once you have established trust.    

You can also refer appropriate matters of your existing clients and connect them to AORs – you will get the opportunity to strategise and execute the entire matter end-to-end even before you have qualified the AOR exam. 

Some of your clients may also insist that you argue their matter at the Supreme Court yourself, even though it is filed through an Advocate-on-Record. This is possible, but will be very rare until you become an AOR, but the few experiences you get will be very rewarding.