The law at its best is still one of the finest things a person can spend their life doing. But then so is love. Perhaps this is simply what it means to want something badly enough.

Here's an investigation into how the legal profession's hiring ecosystem is functionally not so different than a late night on a dating app.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the process of a lawyer seeking employment at a law firm - and of a romantically hopeful individual swiping through a dating app at 2AM - are not so very different in nature.

The fundamental jurisprudence here is that both parties must signal interest before any further proceedings are commenced. In the parlance of modern romance, this process of 'shortlisting' is called 'matching.'

The candidate in need of a law firm job to gain prestige and financial security posts their heavily edited CV into the void on careers@lawfirm.com.

The firm scrolls through applicants with detached efficiency and may, perhaps, swipe right and actually read your application. Otherwise, the firms engage in what we call ghosting (a complete disappearance without explanation), in pursuit of a more suitable option.

There exists, in every major city, a cohort of law firms of high perceived prestige. Their offices are in good postcodes. Their letterheads are tasteful. These firms are the conventionally gorgeous people on the app that almost everyone is trying to match with - fresh law graduates, experienced lawyers, people who aren't even sure they want to work there but feel like they should want to. These firms know this. They have always known this.

This is why their application form makes you upload your CV, then manually retype everything in your CV into separate boxes. And you do it. You do it because it's them. You would fill out forty seven boxes for them.

We now arrive at perhaps the most sophisticated legal doctrine in this field, which I shall term the Doctrine of Maintained Optionality, or keeping people on the hook. Both the hopeless romantics and the professionally ambitious are familiar with the following sequence of events:

The initial interaction is promising. There is warmth. There is expressed interest. There is a second round of dates, or of interviews. You are asked where you see yourself in five years. You answer. They say, "We'll be in touch." And then nothing. But not "nothing" nothing. Just enough like a LinkedIn view here, or an email saying the process is 'ongoing' to prevent you from fully committing to alternative arrangements.

And here's how it works in dating terms:

"I really like you. I think this could be something. I'm not ready to make it official yet, but if you just stay around, keep showing up, keep doing all the things a romantic partner would do - the emotional labour, the time and the effort then maybe, eventually, I’ll consider committing to you."

You would walk away from this scenario if you had an iota of common sense. But you are 23 and you want to work at this firm, so instead you stay. You receive the agreements and have doc.final.v6 on your laptop.

We must now address the phenomenon that I consider the most legally audacious arrangement in modern professional life. A firm acquires the services of a bright young person, who has obtained their law degree. This person is designated variously as a trainee, a paralegal, or an intern. A new position has also opened up in the firm market called 'junior associate'. They are paid just enough to keep them dreaming of that firm job as a regular associate.

In exchange, they receive the following: experience (undefined), exposure (to what, unspecified), mentorship (available, in theory) and, most critically, the implicit understanding that sustained and adequate performance may, eventually, result in an offer of employment.

And every few months, you gently ask with appropriate deference about 'the path forward.' And they say, "we really value your contribution", which is a sentence that contains no information whatsoever but lands warmly enough to keep you for another three months. Eventually, one of two things happens. Either they offer you a position and you feel like you've won something, ignoring entirely that you have spent a year auditioning for a role you should have simply been hired for. Or they don't, because they've found someone new who will do the same things fresh. You have been, in the most technically precise sense of the word, led on.

The same waiting game is played from the other side of the table. Every serious candidate knows their hierarchy: the firm and partners they actually want and the counsel we worship in courts. And while they wait, hopefully, anxiously, they apply to the others. The 'good enough for nows' These firms read the applications, schedule the interviews in good faith. And the moment Priority No. 1 says yes, the others receive nothing. But I suppose this is just how it works. Everyone is someone's backup. Everyone is also, somewhere, someone's first choice. The cruelty is not malicious. It is the way of the world. It somehow makes it worse and also somehow makes it fine.

This is a professional situationship. It has all the emotional architecture of a committed relationship where there is investment, gradually increasing responsibilities and the rearrangement of one's life around another's schedule with none of the security and recognition of one. And like most romantic situationships, most professional situationships are also one-sided, where one of the parties is nonchalant and just enjoying the attention, whereas the other is already dreaming of their life together.

It is a peculiarity of both dating and legal recruitment that certain behaviours which would, in any rational cost-benefit analysis, constitute warnings, are instead interpreted as marks of distinction. This is, perhaps, the most durable feature of human cognition: the capacity to convert available evidence into preferred conclusions.

We spend our entire lives looking for better work and better love to give our lives meaning and purpose. These two things are not so different in how they find us and how they can completely reorganise a person when they finally arrive. The legal profession is one of the oldest in human civilisation. It has thrived through empires, revolutions and the introduction of email. It will also thrive through the era of dating apps and perhaps even find unexpected uses along the way. Lawyers, after all, are nothing if not resourceful.

Mehreen Garg practices law in Delhi courts. The idea behind this article arose over a brief phone call with Siddharth Shukla, fellow lawyer.