Amicus Partners

The end of an admission season tends to put one in a reflective mood. After all, this is the time when the i’s have been dotted, that Statement of Purpose (version “final_final_final”) has been uploaded, and the inevitable last-minute shenanigans of technology have been battled with and overcome.

It is enough to make anyone a veritable philosopher.

It really is.

One observation that was reinforced this admission season was, and forgive for stating the obvious, the power of knowing what you want. What I mean by this is that LLM applicants who have really studied the school they are applying to, and critically examined whether it meets their needs – such applicants tend to have high-quality applications. And while this will remain unverifiable, I suspect that this category of applicants will have a more fulfilling LLM experience than others.

Perhaps.

Unlike the last few years, where the clientele has mostly been those with some work experience, this time around I got to work with a couple of law students in their final year of study. It is quite an interesting experience, and I hope that I get a couple more next year. But not too many because the older I get, the more I struggle to understand some of their lines of thought.

Which is something that I need to work on, after all what good is a consultant who does not understand his clients?

These interactions also took me back to the earliest days of Amicus Partners; back then I would visit law schools in different parts of the country to speak about the LLM application process. I wrote about one such visit to HNLU here. 

These visits were just fantastic – I got to speak with students in-person, which allowed for a greater sense of trust and openness. I also got the chance to better understand the LLM “market” from the perspective of foreign schools looking to “recruit” from India. 

Most importantly, these visits were just so much fun!

There is something to be said about the absurd levels of optimism that university campuses, and their denizens, possess. Without wanting to sound like an Uncle (or perhaps I do), in campuses, life hasn’t done what it might soon do – this can be terribly appealing.

Of course, it was not all fun and games.

For instance, most schools were unable or uninterested or unwilling to pay for these talks. Nor were they interested in taking up our counselling services for their students. Which meant that such in-person visits become financially unsustainable. Also, some law school heads viewed foreign LLMs as unwelcome competition for their own university’s graduate programs – this was troubling but also an apt reflection of the student-university relationship.

Be that as it may, I do think that there is something to be had from re-starting these talks, perhaps focusing on Mumbai’s law schools to cut down on costs and time. Let’s see where that goes. As a stop-gap measure of sorts, law students can now take up consultations at one-tenth of the going rate – just five hundred rupees.

As the next year, and admission season, appears on the horizon, I hope to re-start the campus visits, dig a bit deeper into what makes a good LLM program, and meet a few more of those absurdly optimistic people.