This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, iPleaders.

When I was giving my day zero interviews, every law firm partner who took my interview asked me this question. There were variations, but in the end it was the same.

What is your favourite area of law?

What is the area of law on which we should ask you questions? What is it that you are most confident about?

What do you like about law? Anything that catches your fancy in particular?

Since then, I have helped many law students to prepare for interviews. There are two things I always say, even if you wake me up from my sleep and ask me just the night before your interview. Please prepare for any question that can possibly be asked about things that you have mentioned in your CV. Basically, if you have mentioned you have done certain work in an internship or at a job or an article you have written, you are highly likely to be asked a few questions about those things. What exactly will be asked cannot be predicted. Hence you need to think of predictable and unpredictable questions around all that you have mentioned in your CV, and prepare for the same.

The second is this question: What is your favourite area of law? On which they will ask you freewheeling questions.

Now the thing is that it is not enough to say any random area. Certain areas will quickly get you disqualified. One of my seniors once said “Family Law” when asked this question, and her interview lasted for only 5 minutes. The recruiters asked her – why are you appearing from a law firm job then? You should practice family law in a district court.

Don’t blow your interview like that. Imagine you are giving an interview for a job at Trilegal, AZB or Luthra & Luthra. Should you say my favourite area of law is IP laws or labour laws? I would be very apprehensive to do so. They have very small IP law or labour law teams, and usually they are not looking to hire into those teams. Your chances are much better if you say “Company Law” or “FDI” or “Project Finance” or “Capital Markets” or some such generic business law subject in which law firms have plenty of work.

In my interviews, I said my favourite subject is “Structured Finance.” It surprised and intrigued the interviewers. They asked me a lot of questions about structured finance, especially the partner who worked on finance deals most of the time. I explained to them about SPVs, and explained what brought on the global economic crisis in 2008. They were impressed. I got my job offer.

One of my students from GLC had a very interesting experience. Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas had shortlisted her and 17 others. When her turn for the interview came, she said her favourite area of law is FDI and investment law. Now that is not something recruiters expect to hear from students, because such topics are not properly taught in law schools. Hence, they asked her what they know about it.

Then she had a gala time. She told them everything she had read about in our investment law modules. She was one out of two people who were offered a job. And she said when she walked out of the interview she was quite sure that she was going to land it. She was even asked where and how she learnt all that!

You need to have this one area of law that genuinely interests you, and you got to build up your CV around it if you want a job at a law firm. The subject cannot be any random are of law, but something law firms where you want a job practice and consider valuable with a long term perspective on mind. You need to know enough that if a law firm partner starts talking to you about it, he or she will be definitely impressed by how much you know. That’s the easiest way to crack a law firm interview, which has been proven time and again.

In this area, you will not only know the obvious stuff taught in law school and mentioned in textbooks that everyone is expected to know, but also a lot more. You need to write articles in this area. You need to know the practical aspects of law that lawyers face when they deal with clients in real life. You find out about this topic as much as you can.

Here are 5 subjects I will strongly recommend. You can take any of these and succeed.

Tax Laws – very few lawyers or law students venture into this area, and it is always valuable to law firms. If you are good at it, getting PPO is easiest. Also there are tons of accounting firms and specialized tax law firms that will love to scoop you up. It is known to be difficult and complicated, but if you can create demonstrable expertise in it, your career is set. Here is a course on international tax and transfer pricing, here is another course on GST laws, and another one on corporate taxation.

M&A and investment law, including FDI –  This is the bread and butter for most big law firms. If you are good at this, it is hard for them to miss your talent or to say no to you. It is also one of the most crowded and competitive areas of practice in, after all M&A and private equity jobs are highly sought after. If you can show you understand the due diligence process, understand what are the documents that go into a transactions, and that you are aware of the regulations surrounding M&A, such as takeover code, FDI rules, companies act, you are done. Here is an M&A law course that can help you to reach a stage where even 1st or 2nd year associates in law firms will be glad to know as much as you do. It also covers investment law and banking law for good measure.

Commercial contracts – You could never know too much about contract drafting. It is the numero uno skill for young lawyers. How much bonus you get in your first year, and whether you get a promotion next year will probably depend on your ability to analyze a contract, find loopholes in it, write clauses that address risks you have identified and to help your senior associate in discovering issues that he didn’t discover. In the interview stage, if you can tell them about all the contracts you have already drafted, and have a hearty discussion about it, you are through. When I gave my day zero interview to Luthra & Luthra, I did exactly this. I told them about the first ever agreement I worked on. It was an agreement between a startup incubated at IIT Kharagpur. The incubation agreement, between the incubator and the startup, had a strange clause because of which the startup wasn’t getting investments. The clause said that if the startup raises follow on rounds, then if more shares are issued (an inevitability), then shares would be issued to the incubator free of cost to keep its 3% current shareholding intact! Now that’s a crazy term, and impossible to enforce because how can a company gives shares to a shareholder free of cost? Who is going to pay for those shares? The recruiting partner asked me if I had to write that contract, how will I rewrite the contract to ensure that IIT Kharagpur keeps getting new shares without having to pay. I was stumped. They left me for 5 minutes to think about it. When they came back, I suggested it could be shown as a royalty of some kind that accumulates and then shares are issued against the same. It wasn’t quite correct, there are many gaps in that answer. But they recognized that I was thinking in the right direction and gave me a job offer.

Basically, I got a chance to showcase my practical knowledge of Companies Act as well as experience in contract drafting. They found that to be unusual level of preparedness in a law student. Therefore I bagged the job! Here is a course on contract drafting that can help you reach a very high level of expertise, such that even experienced associates will be impressed by your knowledge and skills and ask you where you learnt so much.

General corporate laws – Taking from the previous example, make sure that you know a lot about general corporate laws if you are interviewing with a big law firm. You will find that knowledge very useful. You cannot say your area of expertise is general corporate laws – but it is something you got to know if you are going to work in a big law firm, no matter which team. This includes all the basic business laws – from business structuring to basics of taxation to technology laws. This is basic minimum knowledge threshold. What exactly do you need to know? I made an exhaustive list once – now it is the syllabus of this business law diploma course. Copy paste it from there if you like. You can also check out this detailed course on companies act and corporate governance if that catches your fancy.

Arbitration – Another area of law in which law firms are experiencing a boom, and they probably have more clients coming in through the door for arbitration than anything else. Law firms are all beefing up their dispute resolution teams, which do both arbitration and litigation. However, saying that your favourite area of law is civil litigation or something like that can be taken in a very wrong way in a big law firm interview. In a litigation firm or in an interview with dispute resolution partner, though, feel free to say so. Always aim for arbitration if you are trying to land a job at one of these law firms and dispute resolution is your area of expertise and preference. Here is an arbitration law course that can help you get expert level knowledge in just 3 months.