An anatomy of the Indian legal profession by Kian Ganz

Kian Ganz, the publishing editor of www.LegallyIndia.com, here gives a brief anatomy of the legal services industry in India. The scale of the industry in India is staggering. India has approximately 1.2 million enrolled lawyers, as well as around 400,000 to 500,000 law students of whom approximately 60,000 to 70,000 graduate to join the legal profession every year. The rate of growth suggests that India will soon be the most lawyered nation on earth, outrunning the US where there were 1,201,968 practicing lawyers in 2010. Ganz says that the Indian justice system conducts itself at a glacial pace, with 4.24 million cases pending in the courts, of which more than 50,000 are before India’s Supreme Court. Corporate lawyers are fairly thin on the ground, however, and rough estimates postulate that there are between 5,000 to 10,000 transactional, corporate or in-house lawyers in India. There are five large national law firms of more than around 200 lawyers, and around 30 to 50 mid-size law firms with more than 20 lawyers.

An anatomy of the Indian legal profession by Kian Ganz thelawyer.com Mon, Oct 31, 2011