11 rejections, 0 publications: What my CV taught me about law firm hiring

There is a certain irony that I’m writing this article. I am about to make a point, in a published piece, that publications are overvalued in law firm hiring. I am aware of how that sounds, but it is precisely because I have gone through this system and have been judged by it, that I think the irony is worth sitting with rather than avoiding.

Walk into any law school library during exam season and you will find a strange sight. Students bent over research papers, not because a professor assigned them, but because they need one more publication before campus placements begin. Ask them what the paper is about and many will struggle to explain it in their own words. Ask them why they wrote it, and the answer is almost always the same: "because it looks good on the CV".

This is the harsh and sad reality of legal education in India today. A student who has spent more than three years inside a courtroom, drafting pleadings and learning how a case actually moves through the system, often finds that this counts for less than a research paper written in a week and published in a journal barely anyone reads. The question worth asking is not whether publications have value. It is why they outweigh practical experience in the hiring decisions of firms that expect fresh recruits to function as lawyers and not researchers from day one.

I am writing this as someone who has lived this mismatch, not observed it from a distance. My CV has no publications on it. What it does have is a genuine body of litigation experience: internships where I sat through cross-examinations, attended several client meetings, drafted applications under real deadlines and watched senior counsel think on their feet in front of a judge.

That experience has, on 11 occasions, not been enough to get me past the CV shortlisting stage at top tier law firms. Not because the internships were weak, or the recommendation letters poor, but simply because the box for "publications" on my application form was empty. Several law firms now build this requirement directly into the form itself, some as a mandatory field. This is not a soft preference recruiters lean towards. In many cases, it functions as an actual gatekeeping filter, applied before a human being has properly read the file.

I do not say this to argue that publications are worthless. A good paper reflects real ability. What I struggle to accept is the comparison itself: that a research paper, written alone, at one's own pace, with no real consequence if it is mediocre, is being more or less compared to hundreds of hours spent inside actual courtrooms, learning a craft that cannot be picked up from a library desk. These two things are not on the same scale.

Most top-tier firms, when asked, will say they want well-rounded candidates. In practice, hiring happens at scale, often through committees screening hundreds of CVs for a handful of seats. Nobody has the time to assess reasoning ability or courtroom temperament in 30 seconds, but a CV can be scanned that fast. A student who spent 3 months drafting written submissions in a busy litigation chamber and one who spent 3 months making coffee and photocopies at a bigger firm, both get to write "intern" on their CV, with little to separate the two. A publication, by contrast, has a title, a journal name and sometimes an ISSN number. It photographs well on a resume in a way that "prepared daily cause list" never will.

The pressure to publish has created its own economy. Search for "how to build a law CV" and you will find guides insisting internships alone are rarely enough and that a strong CV needs a publication layered on top. This has fed a flood of journals willing to publish almost anything, often for a fee. India's University Grants Commission (UGC) found that when universities nominated journals for an approved list, close to 90 per cent of the nominations were of poor quality: fake editorial boards, no functioning peer review, no verifiable history. The list was so unreliable that the UGC scrapped it altogether in 2024. Students know exactly which journals will accept a paper with minimal scrutiny and many know a modest fee will speed up acceptance. Nobody pretends this is peer-reviewed scholarship. It is a transaction: a CV line bought with a weekend of writing.

Anyone who has actually worked inside a law firm or a litigation chamber knows the job bears almost no resemblance to writing a research paper. When you are drafting a legal notice under deadline, reading between the lines of a contract clause, sensing when a client is not telling you the whole story, none of this actually comes from writing a paper alone, at your own pace, with no consequence if it is mediocre. A well-written paper can show a student thinks and writes clearly. It cannot show whether they can survive the ordinary chaos of legal practice. Yet, at the CV stage, the paper often carries more weight, simply because it is easier to compare than the quality of an internship.

In fairness to firms, this is not entirely unreasonable. Publications are easier to screen at scale and a well-written paper does test something real - independent research and structured writing done without hand-holding. The problem is not that firms value these qualities. It is that publications, especially of the pay-and-publish variety, have become a weak, easily gamed proxy for them.

Students at well-funded law schools, with research assistantships and paid diploma courses offering a guaranteed publication certificate, can build an impressive CV without ever setting foot in a courtroom. Students at less-resourced institutions, doing genuinely demanding litigation internships, often have neither the time nor the spare cash to chase a publication on the side. This quietly rewards access as much as skill and costs firms later too: a candidate hired mainly for a shiny CV often reaches the first year of practice with real gaps and firms end up re-teaching what the CV implied they already knew.

None of this means publications should disappear from a CV. A well-researched paper on a genuinely difficult question, published in a journal that actually reviews submissions, is a real achievement. The fix is not to abandon publishing, but to stop treating it as a substitute for practical competence. Firms could ask a different question at interview: not "how many papers have you published," but "tell me about a problem you solved during an internship." Even one honest follow-up question about a listed publication, such as "what was the hardest part of writing this," takes 30 seconds and separates genuine engagement from a fee paid just for the sake of a CV line.

Legal recruitment claims to look for future lawyers, not future researchers. Yet, hiring, as it stands today, often rewards a CV full of publications over the CV with practical court room exposure and years of litigation internship experience. This is because an easily gamed credential has been allowed to substitute for a harder, more honest assessment of what a candidate can actually do. Fixing this will not happen through one article. But it starts with an honest admission that a lot of what currently passes for research is not research at all. It is a CV line, dressed up to look like one.

Publications are not the problem. Using them as a shortcut for judging real ability is. I am not writing this because publications have no value. I am writing this because more than 11 rejections taught me that firms are measuring the wrong thing and mistaking a CV line for a lawyer's real ability.

Krishna Beena Rohit Chheda is a recent law graduate of Government Law College, Mumbai.