Dear Student,

So the CLAT results are out. Congratulations to all those who’ve done well. While what counts as a good rank or a good score might be relative, it helps to remember that this is where your law school journey begins. Or not, should you choose to opt for something else.

Either way, LST is here to help you every step of the way. Our task doesn’t end with the declaration of the results, and we take our responsibility towards getting you into the law school of your choice quite seriously. The post-result notifications on the CLAT website can be a little nebulous, but don’t worry, we’re here to simplify things for you.

A look at the CLAT website will show you that the 21st to the 25th May are the dates during which you can fill up your preferences, and that the subsequent counseling requires you to pay a fee between June 4th and 10th. We’ll break these stages down for you further.

i)        The Preference Filling

This is a crucial decision-making juncture for you, and you wouldn’t want to lose out on a potentially good law school owing to general perception and lack of information. So we’ve provided you with an indicative preference list, so you know what the law school hierarchy looks like (sadly, we know there is one, and all NLUs aren’t the same). However, that’s not to say that you should go solely by this list, since what you do with the law school you eventually go to, is down to you to a large extent. Graduates of all law schools have done well for themselves regardless of what their CLAT rank was.

So take a look, but you might also want to consider other factors such as your location, the fees of the NLU in question (there are differences), whether you’re eventually looking at a law firm career or an academic one (or something else entirely), how pretty the campus is (believe us, that’s a factor for many people) and so forth.

There are two basic assumptions that have been made here. One, you may not know for sure what trajectory your legal career is going to take (litigation, Corporate law…). Two, NLUs that are older are better established therefore more consistent in turning out well-prepared graduates.

For LST’s suggested list in the order of the preference, Click here

ii)      Counseling Fee

You will realize that since the CLAT follows a merit-cum-preference system, and since the number of seats actually available is always less than the number of applicants, merely filling in your preferences wouldn’t be enough to get you to the law school of your choice. The counseling process is supposed to tell you whether you will get your first, second or even third preference.

Following the filling of preferences, there will be an indicative seat allocation depending on the ranks and the number of seats. Those whose names appear on this indicative list will be required to deposit 50,000 INR either online or offline. The online process would involve using either credit card/debit card the way it was used for the submission of the application fee. The offline process would involve bank challan or whatever method the CLAT committee might prescribe. It’s adjustable against your fee, or refundable (with a deduction of 10,000 if you get allotted an NLU but don’t take it). It’s refundable completely if your name appears on the indicative allotment but you don’t end up getting any NLU.

To help you make that call, and get a sense of whether or not you’ll get the NLU that you want, we’ve prepared an indicative cut-off rank list. Remember that this doesn’t definitively indicate which NLU you would get; it’s only based on past years’ data.

Please click here to refer to the indicative cut-off list

Essentially, there are two things that you need to do:

a)      Use the preference list to rank the NLUs in decreasing order of how much you want them. Do this by the 25th May latest.

b)      If your name appears in the indicative allotment list, deposit the 50,000 INR by the 10th June latest, and use the rank-wise cutoff list to figure out which NLUs you can realistically get.

So all the very best with the process, and should you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

To refer to the seats break up for CLAT 2015, please click here.

Good Luck!!
Team LST