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The legal profession in Pakistan is a rigged game. And professors who are asked to advise students on their prospects cannot shy away from making this fact, very frankly, plain.
The big firms are, almost entirely, controlled either as family concerns or as partnerships of variously well-connected men with access to sources of capital, which in turn are a few and in the hands of a very few.
Wealth and success is reproduced by access to networks of elite schooling, family relations, or class-based associations.
Almost all of these firms are managed by men, or in very few cases by women who derive power by association to wealthy men.
The economy is built almost entirely on prestige, with the scale being, from highest to lowest, a Cambridge or Oxford qualification, an LLM from the US or UK, the increasingly less prestigious Bar-at-Law training, LUMS or an external University of London LLB, then local programs.
Not to say anything of the training students can receive at these firms, advancement opportunities are few and usually dependent on performance within a rubric that neatly privileges the reproduction of hierarchies.
Students locked out of this access to the highest-paying market can, variously, start from scratch through apprenticeship with a host of solo practitioners.
The compensation for these apprenticeships is the apprenticeship itself, requiring a level of sacrifice those from outside the cities, or from family backgrounds where they are expected to immediately contribute, cannot make.
In addition, these solo practitioners are usually men, and generally these apprenticeship opportunities are only accessible by young men.
Starting from the grassroots, from a thara in a room proximate to the courts, very rarely, if ever, leads to advancement that goes beyond a precarious middle class livelihood, without access to networks from which one can draw clients.
At almost all these levels of the market, what is most rewarded is loyalty and deference.
It is no wonder that students, confronted by this reality, turn to the Civil Service Exam, which promises at least the hope of a meritorious rise, of sorts, to prestige and to power and to stability.
And yet there is opportunity here, for there is need for lawyers outside of corporate and commercial practice. But we do not yet have the support systems necessary to help cultivate those other areas where legal expertise in needed.
No fellowships for students intending to go into public service or to serve underrepresented communities, or innovate in other ways. All of it of course resting against a political background where the law is constantly undermined politically, financially, and by the gun.
None of this is to say that success cannot be had within these circumstances of inequality, but one must know what one is up against.
