Pursuing Law offers a promising career with a myriad opportunities, due to globalisation in the legal sector. The private sector has now opened doors to law professionals to work in real estate, healthcare, film industry, and housing. This has led to transnational legal structures and discourses and blurring of lines in the industry.
Law has always been considered an exciting and noble profession, with a visible impact. It requires years of hard work, dedication and right decision-making, as the industry has an extensive course structure. One of the most crucial choices involves picking the right specialisation.
Multiple options
Usually, colleges make it mandatory for students to take up all the subjects in the first year to help them select the right specialisation, as it plays a significant role in building a successful career.
Before choosing a specialisation, students must first pursue an undergraduate (UG) degree such as BA LLB (Hons.), BBA LLB, BLS-LLB, B.Com LLB, BSc LLB. Some widely chosen options offered by the top law colleges in India are: Business and Corporate Law; Criminal and Security Law; Human Rights Law; Labour Law; Media Law and Intellectual Property Law.
Here are some tips to help students pick their specialisations.
Assess your abilities: Understanding and analysing your strengths and weaknesses and making a decision takes these into account impacts one’s future. Although universities offer a curriculum prepared by experts, it is up to the student to extract the knowledge, evaluate it carefully and decide which specialisation will prove beneficial. For example, If you are an excellent orator and skilled at public speaking, you could be appropriate for litigation. On the other hand, if public speaking isn’t your strength, you can opt for transactional law that requires one-on-one communication.
Future opportunities: Research what working in that field entails. With many available options, getting inputs from credible sources like those working in that area is critical. Then students can consider the feedback, correlate them with the skill set, and take the final call. For example, Corporate Law is an upcoming and increasingly popular specialisation among industry experts. It focuses on how corporates interact externally through commercial transactions and internally through corporate governance. With the growing industrialisation, this field is here to stay.
Pay scale: While Law offers a plethora of specialisations, the job market tends to fluctuate. While some jobs are prone to saturation, the demand for others keep increasing. This changing cycle needs to be studied while choosing one’s specialised field. The salary of a lawyer wanting to start practice in a court differs significantly from someone working with the legal process outsourcing. Although Law is a lucrative profession, the pay scale is affected by factors such as student’s calibre, popularity and experience. For example, while business lawyers were among the highest paid, today it is cyber lawyers, as technological advances have led to a increase in cybercrimes.
The author is the Principal, T.John College
