3 Parameters To Consider While Choosing Your Law Specialization

Pursuing law studies offers a promising career with an influx of opportunities due to globalization in the law sector. The private sector has now opened doors to law professionals to work with real estate, healthcare, film industry, and housing. This has led to transnational legal structures and discourses along the dimensions of extensity. These extensive dimensions and blurring lines in the industry has given the aspiring students a boost in taking up law as a profession.  

Law has always been considered as an exciting and noble profession having 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 specialization.  

Usually, colleges make it mandatory for students to take up all the subjects in the first year to give them clarity of all domains. This helps the students make the right choice in picking a specialization in the future as it plays a significant role in building a successful law career. Having said that, some students get that clarity at an early stage, while most of them struggle with their decision even after pursuing the Bachelor's degree.  

Before choosing a specialized field, students must first pursue an Undergraduate (UG) degree such as BA LLB (Hons.), BBA LLB, BLS-LLB, BCom LLB, BSc LLB after which they can pick the desired specialization. Listed below are a few most widely chosen law specializations offered by the top law colleges in India:  

• Business and Corporate Law 

• Criminal and Security Law 

• Human Rights Law  

• Labour Law 

• Media Law 

• Intellectual Property Law  

Students can review the below-mentioned parameters to pick their future practice area more decisively:   

Assess your abilities: When we talk about assessing your abilities, it all begins from within. Understanding and analyzing your strengths and weaknesses and making a decision that respects and balances out both your qualities, impacts what the future holds for you.  

Although the universities offer a curriculum that is prepared thoroughly for the respective industry with the help of experts, it is up to the student to extract that knowledge, evaluate it carefully and decide which specialization will prove beneficial for the future.   

Example: If someone is an excellent orator and holds a mastery in public speaking, one could be appropriate for litigation while on the other hand, if public speaking isn’t your strength, one can opt for transactional law that requires one on one communication.   

Future Opportunities: Determining a rewarding specialization involves researching what working in that field entails. With the plenty of specializations available in the industry, exerting a significant effort in researching from credible sources is extremely critical.   

Consulting lawyers who are a part of the field, one is aspiring to work in, can be a reliable source. After conducting this research, the student can then carefully introspect the observations, correlating them with the skillset and then take the final call.    

Example: Corporate law is an upcoming specialization that is gaining massive popularity among industry experts. It focuses on how the corporates interact externally through commercial transactions and internally through corporate governance. With the growing industrialization, one can easily make out that Corporate Law as a field is here to stay.   

Payscale: While law as a career offers a plethora of specializations, it has a fluctuating market concerning job opportunities. While some jobs are prone to saturation, the demand for some jobs simply keeps on increasing with time. This changing cycle needs to be studied by every law aspirant while choosing their specialized field.  

The salary of a lawyer wanting to start practising in a court differs significantly from someone working with the legal process outsourcing. Although law is a very high paying profession altogether, the payscale is mostly affected by factors like the student’s calibre, popularity and the experience one beholds.  

Example: While business lawyers were among the highest-paid lawyers, the position has now been taken over by cyber lawyers as the advancement in technology that has led to a hike in cybercrimes.   

If you are one of those students who can work well in stressful situations and enjoy constructive and tactful arguments, law is the field for you. Although choosing the right specialization is no cakewalk, the parameters mentioned above can help you pick your area of expertise that is best suitable for you.  

Dr Sukhvinder Singh Dari

Guest Author The author is Director, Symbiosis Law School, Nagpur