Where this route goes
What a law degree actually leads to
Most people picture a courtroom. That is one room in a large building, and many lawyers spend their entire careers never standing in it. This is what the work is, what it costs, and who tends to find it bearable — written so that deciding against it counts as the page working.
The odds, before anything else. In CLAT 2026, 72631 people sat the exam for 3705 seats. The full figures, with sources →
How you actually get there
| When | What | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| After Class 12 | Five-year integrated LLB | BA LLB, BBA LLB and similar. You enter straight from school, not after a bachelor's degree — the choice arrives earlier than it does for medicine or an MBA. CLAT is the entrance this site has sourced; AILET, SLAT and the state CETs are the same door and are not in the catalogue yet. |
| After any degree | Three-year LLB | The other door, and the one people forget. Finish any bachelor's degree first, then three years of law. Slower on paper, and it means the decision does not have to be made at seventeen. Its entrances are university-level and none is in this catalogue. |
Enrolment with a State Bar Council, and the All India Bar Examination. A law degree on its own does not make you a lawyer.
What you can qualify with
No subject is specified — open to PCM, PCB, PCMB, Commerce, Arts.
Any Class 12 stream qualifies, including science. Nothing you choose at fifteen closes this route, and the minimum-marks rule is on the exam page with its source.
The four jobs people mean by "lawyer"
| Branch | Decided | What the days are | Why anyone does it | Money | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Litigation | after the degree | Drafting, filing, and waiting — a lot of waiting, in corridors, for a matter that gets listed and then adjourned. The court appearance is twenty minutes at the end of weeks of paper, and for the first years it is somebody else making it while you carry the file. | Somebody with very little power is up against somebody with a great deal of it, and for a few hours you are the thing standing in between. When it works you can point at the person it worked for. Nothing else on this page offers that. | Slow to start. Independent practice takes years to become reliable. | People who can hold an argument together under interruption, and who do not mind that most days end without resolution. |
| Corporate and transactional | after the degree | Contracts, diligence, compliance, negotiation. Almost no court. This is where a large share of NLU graduates go, and it is closer to finance in rhythm than to anything in a legal drama. | Deals that reshape companies, run by people at the top of a difficult craft, and you are in the room for them in your twenties. If precision is satisfying to you, this is where it is paid for. | The best-paid entry point in law, and the reason a lot of people pick it. It is also the one that buys your evenings: the pay and the hours are the same deal, and nobody is offered one without the other. | People who are precise, can read a hundred pages without skipping, and can work long hours to somebody else's deadline. |
| Judiciary A state judicial services examination, sat after the degree. This is the one job here that needs a decision the other three do not. | after the degree | A separate competitive exam after the degree, then a career on the bench. A different life from practice: less selling yourself, more reading and deciding. | You stop having to argue for a side. Being the person who decides — and being trusted with it — is a different standing from anything advocacy offers, and it does not depend on who is paying. | Government scale. Secure rather than high. | People who would rather weigh arguments than make them. |
| Policy, academia and public interest An LLM, and UGC-NET to teach. | after the degree | Research, drafting, litigation for causes, teaching. Often the reason people say they want to do law in the first place. | You work on the thing you actually care about, and when you win the argument it changes a rule rather than a case. Slower, and it reaches further. | Generally the least of these, and worth knowing before rather than after. | People with a subject they care about more than they care about the money. |
What it costs
| Cost | What that means in practice |
|---|---|
| The reading is the job | Not "there is a lot of reading". The reading IS the work — dense, repetitive, badly written, and you must be able to find the one clause that matters in forty pages that do not. If you dislike reading closely, nothing else about this route will rescue it. |
| Writing under someone else's rules | Legal writing is not expressive writing. There is a form, and the job is to fill it exactly — the same phrases, in the same order, because a judge has read ten thousand of them and yours has to be findable. People who love writing sometimes discover they hate this, which is worth finding out at fifteen rather than at twenty-two. |
| The years before it pays | Litigation in particular asks for a long unglamorous apprenticeship. The salary figures that circulate are corporate-firm figures, and they are not what most of the profession earns. |
| Fees | NLU tuition and hostel run to lakhs a year, and the five-year degree is five years of it. Scholarships and loans exist; the sticker price is worth checking before the exam rather than after the result. |
If you felt resistance, that counts. If you read the costs section and felt resistance rather than recognition, that is worth more than any of the encouragement on this page. There is no shortage of routes, and picking this one because it sounded impressive is the single most expensive mistake available here.
CLAT: dates, eligibility and the real denominators →
Everything above is judgement, not data. It cites no document and no checked date, unlike the exam pages, and you should weigh it accordingly. The one thing here that is sourced is the competition figure, and it lives on the CLAT page with the working shown.