By Tariq Khan
Dear Student,
I am writing this not as someone who arrived easily, but as someone who has spent enough years in this profession to know what it asks of you and what it quietly takes if you are not paying attention.
I have learnt from some of the finest legal minds in the world, and I have watched brilliant people burn out and confuse exhaustion with excellence. What follows is what I believe. Not what sounds impressive. What is actually true.
The NLU question
Yes, the name of your institution matters. Doors open faster, internships arrive sooner, the first call comes earlier. That is real. It does not settle the question. What a top tier law school buys you is a faster start, not a better finish.
I have watched graduates of celebrated institutions plateau because they coasted on the name, and I have watched students from unremarkable colleges build practices those institutions would be proud to claim, because they worked with a hunger no ranking confers.
If you are at an NLU, do not mistake the door for the destination. If you are not, do not mistake the door for the ceiling. You must construct the network that others are handed. You must write more, appear more, demonstrate more. That is harder. It is also entirely possible, and the lawyers who arrive through the harder path usually get noticed more, because they never had the option of letting the name do the work for them.
What I did not have
I will tell you plainly what my own years looked like, because you deserve that instead of a letter written from a position I never occupied.
I did not have the library everyone assumes you had. Mine was outdated, half the volumes missing, and the newer editions never arrived on time. I did not have the databases that moot court competitions expect you to have mastered before you walk into the room.
I learnt to argue with photocopied judgments and borrowed logins and whatever a senior could spare for an evening. I did not have the money that pays for a flight to a competition in another city without a second thought, or a laptop that did not crash mid draft.
I did not spend my energy explaining why I could not do something. I spent it finding the version of the thing I could do. If I could not afford the database, I found the judgment through a senior who had access. If the library did not stock the book, I asked someone five years ahead of me whether they still had their notes. If I could not travel for the competition, I found the one that was reachable and prepared for it as though it were the biggest stage in the country.
None of this was heroic. It was the only option, and I took it because stopping was never something I was willing to do.
I know people who started with no name, no money, no network, no access, who are now sitting in rooms that decide outcomes for parties with far more resources than they ever had. What they carried instead was consistency applied without interruption over years, and a refusal to treat their starting point as their final one.
Where you begin decides how much work the early years will ask of you, and that is a real and unfair difference. It does not decide the ceiling. The ceiling is set later, by what you choose to do with the years once you have them.
Internships
The Indian law student treats internships as a stamp collection, five star firms, prestigious addresses, a CV that fills up while the learning stays secondary. I understand the incentive. But there is a cost that only becomes visible later.
The internship that changes you is not the one at the most famous firm. It is the one where someone trusted you with something real and you had to figure it out, where a senior expected you to have read the file and not just the brief, where you made a mistake and were told about it directly and had to correct it. Those experiences are rarer than the prestigious address, and worth far more.
When you write for an internship, write as a person, not an applicant. A single specific question about a lawyer’s actual practice will be remembered long after a polished cover letter has been deleted. Most students send the same email to forty firms. The ones who get called back sent something different to five.
And once you arrive, be relevant from day one. Read what is on the table. Ask one good question instead of ten mediocre ones. Leave every piece of work in a state that needs no correction. The lawyers who remember their interns remember them because they made things easier.
Contacts and networks
Networking in the Indian legal market has become transactional: connect on LinkedIn, attend the seminar, collect the card, send the follow up email that goes nowhere. Chase proximity to serious thinking instead, not proximity to famous names.
The lawyer who is not yet well known but doing good work in a developing practice area is often more valuable to you than the celebrated senior with no time and no memory of your name. Seniority is not the same as relevance.
When a senior gives you their time, do not spend it performing impressiveness. Ask the question you actually have. Say what you actually think. People can tell the difference between a student who is curious and one who is managing an impression. That distinction, more than any card collected at a seminar, is what a real network is built on.
Taking chances
The pressure to follow the obvious path, top firm, structured training, the recognised route, is significant, and there is nothing wrong with that path. But it is not the only one. Some of the most interesting careers I have seen were built on choices that looked strange at the time: the student who turned down a corporate seat for a smaller litigation practice where they would actually appear in court, the lawyer who left a large firm for a jurisdiction no one else was taking seriously.
Know the difference between a risk and a mistake. A risk is a departure from the expected path with real upside, even if the outcome is uncertain. A mistake is a departure made without thought or preparation. If what stands in front of you is a genuine risk and not fear dressed as caution, take it. The career that looks safe is often the one that quietly stagnates.
On being treated unfairly
John Roberts, in a commencement address that has stayed with me longer than most things said at podiums, told a room of graduating students something that sounded strange until you sat with it. He said he hoped they would be treated unfairly from time to time, so they would come to know the value of justice. He hoped they would be lonely occasionally, so they would not take friendship for granted.
He hoped they would lose sometimes, and lose in front of people who would not be gracious about it, so they would understand what sportsmanship actually costs. He said these things were coming whether he wished them or not, and what would matter was whether the students could find the lesson inside the misfortune.
I think about that often in this profession, because law hands out unfairness with some regularity, and rarely to the people who deserve it. You will lose an argument that was better than the one that won. You will be dismissed by someone senior who did not bother to read your note. You will watch a less prepared colleague get the opportunity you wanted, for reasons that have nothing to do with merit.
None of that is a sign that the profession is broken, though it will feel that way in the moment. The students who last are not the ones spared unfair treatment. They are the ones who let it teach them precision instead of bitterness. Take the lesson. Leave the grievance behind.
On luck and patience
Luck is real. The right internship through a family contact, the matter that lands on your desk because a senior was unavailable. Pretending otherwise does a disservice to students starting without those advantages. What is also true is that luck finds the prepared more often than it finds the coasting.
The student who has done the reading converts a lucky moment into something lasting. The student who has not converts the same moment into a story they cannot repeat.
Legal careers are long, and the things that matter most, reputation, judgment, the trust of clients who bring you their most significant problems, are built over years, not months. The partners who are respected did not arrive quickly. They got there through the accumulation of small serious decisions, the matter handled well when no one was watching, the honest advice given when the easier advice would have been forgiven. That accumulation is invisible in the moment and decisive over time.
Patience is not passivity. It is doing the right work now for a return you will not see for a while, and trusting that quality, applied consistently, eventually finds its audience.
The glorification of exhaustion
There is a culture in this profession that treats sleeplessness as a credential, the associate who has not taken a weekend in three months, the lawyer who answers emails at two in the morning and wants you to know it. Exhaustion is not excellence. It is sometimes a byproduct of it, but it is not the thing itself.
The lawyer performing at the highest level is not the one who worked the most hours. It is the one who thought most clearly and made the best decisions under pressure, and chronic sleep deprivation erodes exactly those qualities. Work hard, work seriously, and when a matter demands everything you have, give it. But do not confuse that with a permanent state of emergency. That is not dedication. It is poor management of yourself, and eventually it shows in the work.
A life beyond law
The lawyers I admire most are not the ones with no other interests. They are the ones who brought something to the work that could only have come from outside it, a person who reads beyond law and understands human behaviour in a way that shows in cross examination, a person who has struggled with something personally and carries a steadiness under pressure that technical training alone cannot produce.
Do not abandon your relationships for your career. Do not stop reading, or following something you love. These are not indulgences. They are investments in the person who will sit across from a difficult client or write a submission at midnight.
Honesty
This profession will test your honesty in small, undramatic ways: the memo where you are unsure but the client wants certainty, the moment in a hearing where the argument is weak and the temptation is to make it loudly anyway.
The lawyers who are trusted rather than merely retained are the ones who have shown, over years, that they will tell you what is true rather than what you want to hear. That reputation is hard to build and almost impossible to rebuild once it breaks.
Do not be too hard on yourself
You will make mistakes, some of them will matter, and none of that is reason to stop. The lawyers who manage their careers well are not the ones who made no mistakes. They are the ones who did not let the mistakes decide the trajectory, who corrected what could be corrected and moved forward without the weight of self punishment, which achieves nothing and costs a great deal.
Law is one of the great privileges of professional life. It places you at the centre of disputes that matter to real people, in rooms where the quality of your thinking is the only currency that counts. If you choose it, choose it fully. Bring your honesty, your patience, your willingness to be wrong and to learn. Bring the parts of you that exist outside it too. They will make you better inside it.
With respect and good wishes,
A practitioner who is still learning.
Tariq Khan
Tariq Khan is Partner and Head of International Litigation and Arbitration at M&CO Legal, Dubai, UAE.
