Reality of Legal Education in India: The biggest fraud in India isn’t in the Courts- It’s in The Law Schools.

The greatest fraud in India isn’t happening in the Courts-its being orchestrated by Law Schools.

The Legal Education system is multi-crore scam: selling students the myth of power and wealth and sending them to this industry where the backbone consists of nepotism, exploitation, and a system based on corruption.

In short, Indian Law Schools can be best called overpriced factories for manufacturing unemployable graduates. A six-figure promise is all a law school holds out; that is to hand over nothing short of unpaid internship, corporate slavery, and where CONNECTIONS have to be preferred instead of merit.

Thousands of young students enter Law School every year with the hope of becoming the next Harish Salve or Fali Nariman. Reality? Most will barely manage to make 25k a month after graduating. Many will drop out of law altogether, being forced into unrelated jobs just to survive.

This is not a failure of Legal Education-it’s a brazen con game where institutions, senior lawyers, and are allowed to rot.

The Legal Education Racket: Pay Lakhs, Get Nothing

Private Law Colleges: Degree Mills for the Desperate

Private Law Schools are nothing but scam factories. They charge 10-30 lakhs for a degree, yet fail to provide even the basics competent faculty, practical training, or decent placements. Their business model? Take money from clueless 18-year-olds and dump them into an oversaturated legal market.

They exaggerate placement statistics, promising “100 PERCENT PLACEMENT” while hiding the fact that most graduates either remain unemployed or take up poorly paid jobs in obscure law firms. They push students into expensive moot courts and competitions, not for learning but to inflate their own rankings. And when students struggle to find jobs after graduation? The administration simply shrugs-because they have already made their money.

NLUs: The Elitist Dream with Cracking Foundations

National Law Universities (NLUs) were once the gold standard of legal education. Now they are expensive, poorly managed and more interested in branding rather than teaching students how to practice law in real world.

Most NLUs are glorified corporate training? centers, obsessed with churning out a handful of high paying? law firm recruits while ignoring the majority percentage of students who don’t get those jobs. For them, the rest can struggle in Litigation or find their own way because unless You are the top 5 percent of your batch , your law school doesn’t care.

The “meritocratic” illusion of NLUs is a joke most of the job go to students with elite family background, fluent English, and personal connections. If you are from a small town, a non English medium school or a middle class family, Good Luck surviving.

The Great Placement Scam: 100 %

Unemployment, 0% Accountability

Where are the Jobs?

Law schools proudly claim that their graduates are “highly employable.” But where are these jobs? The reality is grim:

·?Corporate Law Firms: Only less than 10% of law graduates will ever work in a top-tier corporate law firm and, even if they do, are then subjected to 16-hour work days, toxic work cultures, and mental health breakdowns.

·?Litigation: If you think you're going to walk into court and start earning, forget it. Most junior litigators work for free under senior lawyers or earn a pathetic ?5,000-?15,000 per month for years before seeing any real money.

·?Judiciary & UPSC: The law schools take pride in hosting students who crack the judiciary exam or UPSC. What it doesn't inform you? Barely 1% of the students succeed in these super-competitive exams.

·?Legal Academics: Professors and researchers are paid so poorly that most law graduates don't even consider this an option. In short, the placement scam is one of the biggest frauds in Indian education—and law schools are getting away with it.

Curriculum of Law Schools

Outdated, Useless, and Designed to Keep You Stupid Law students in India are not trained to be lawyers—they are trained to be parrots. The curriculum is a joke, designed for the 19th century, not the 21st.

· No Industrial Training: Most students graduate without ever drafting a contract, filing a case, or arguing in a real court.

· Pointless Memorization: The law schools require students to memorize hundreds of case laws that have no practical application.

· Lack of Industry Relevance: The subjects of Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence are given undue importance, while the actual skills like negotiation, contract drafting, and corporate compliance are not given importance.

?At the time of graduation, the student is utterly ill-equipped for the actual rigors of the practice. This is no accident—it suits the needs of the legal profession to have an endless stream of desperate, ignorant, and poor young lawyers.

Unpaid Internships: Modern-Day Slavery

Internships in India are this scam within a scam. Law firms, senior advocates, and companies expect students to work for free-sometimes for months-without offering a single rupee in compensation.

Even worse, most internships don’t even teach anything useful. Interns are expected to do clerical work, coffee runs, and proofreading—not real legal work. But students keep taking these internships because without them, they won’t get jobs.

Litigation: A Rich Man’s Game

Want to be a litigator? Prepare to suffer. Litigation is a profession that is a hellscape of exploitation, nepotism, and financial insecurity.

· If you are not from a family of lawyers, you will work for years for free or next to nothing under senior advocates.

·?Clients want lawyers with decades of experience—meaning young litigators have a hard time getting cases.

· Bribery and corruption are rampant—justice isn't about skill, it's about money and influence.

For most law grads, litigation is not a career it's financial suicide.?

Corporate Law: Fancy Salary, No Life

Corporate law jobs are the only decent-paying ones in the legal field, but they come at a cost.

· 16-hour workdays, zero work-life balance

·?Toxic culture, intense pressure, and mental health breaks

· Burnout within 3-5 years, resulting in career changes or leaving the practice of law

Even the so-called “best jobs” in law come with conditions that make them unsustainable for most people.

Who Actually Succeeds? The Privileged Few

At the top of India's legal industry sit the same families, the same names, and the same power structures.

· The largest law firms are controlled by families who hand down leadership positions like royal titles.

· Children of Judges and senior advocates get first priority in securing the best opportunities.

· If you don't have connections, you are invisible.

Merit in the legal profession? It's a myth.

How to Fix This Scam

1. Regulate Private Law Schools: Close sub-par law schools running only to print money.

2. Guarantee Paid Internships: Prohibit law firms from hiring unpaid interns.

3. Introduce a Minimum Wage for Lawyers: No lawyer should earn less than ?50,000 per month after graduation.

4. Revamp Curriculum: Stop teaching irrelevant case laws and teach practical lawyering skills.

5. End Nepotism in Law Firms and Judiciary: Introduce Merit-Based, Transparent Hiring and Stop Legal Dynasties from Dominating the Business.

Conclusion: Law Schools Are the Biggest Scam in India

The Indian legal education system is rigged, exploitative, and designed to keep students poor and desperate. It's time to stop pretending that law school is a ticket to success. For most, it's just a trap that leads to financial ruin.

If law students want justice, they should start by demanding it from the legal education system itself.

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