This article has been written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, iPleaders with inputs from Abhyuday Agarwal, COO, iPleaders.

How do Indians learn law?

Here is how law is taught in Indian law schools, whether traditional law colleges or the hallowed National Law Universities.

You attend lectures by law teachers, who usually have little to no practical experience of doing actual legal work (especially because full time law teachers are not supposed to practice law in India, due to a strange regulation put in place by the Bar Council of India). The academic expertise they claim is usually based on text books they read, or research they do around legal doctrines. On the other hand, students join law schools and pay big fees in the hope that they will score good jobs when they graduate, with big law firms, in-house corporate teams or at least with a chamber of a good lawyer.

The distance between what those firms, in-house legal teams and lawyers practice and what the teachers teach in law school is massive.

In law schools, you learn sections of important statutes, commentary by jurists around these sections and if you are in a good law school, then case laws which is essentially interpretations of these statutes. There are supposed to be clinical classes, where you are also supposed to learn the practical side of law towards the end of law school, such as drafting and negotiation, client counselling, but those classes breeze by without sufficient weightage.

The result is that most law students graduate from law school completely unprepared to deal with the work that they are supposed to handle as lawyers. A law student usually takes contract law classes within first two years of joining the law school. However, if you ask them, you will see that they have no idea about what are the usual clauses in common legal contracts, or how to create a negotiation strategy. They surely read the Civil Procedure Code, but have no idea as to how a civil suit is filed at the registry of a court, or how litigation strategy is designed, or how to draft a basic petition or application for that matter. They would inevitably study the Companies Act, with no idea as to how corporate governance is designed or enforced, or how to do basic compliances under the same act.

Basically, graduate lawyers suffer from a tremendous lack of knowledge as well as skills with respect to client work, and have little idea about the legal work that happens in the real world.

So how do Indians learn legal work that will make them employable, or allow them to serve paying clients?

They are completely on their own with respect to this. When you hear that it takes 5 years or 10 years to establish oneself in the legal practice and to begin to earn enough to earn a sum good enough to survive with decent living standards, that is because of this issue. Senior lawyers hire junior lawyers for a pittance, and often openly say that the junior is lucky to even get a place to stand in their office. This is a very unusual thing, but from the seniors perspective they have to take responsibility for training an unskilled person to do work that requires high level of skills, and hence, they can’t afford to pay too much to such a novice.

This is why although lawyering is generally very well paid work, young lawyers earn too little, and continue to work very hard for their seniors, in the hope of making it big one day.

However, it is entirely possible to build your own practice early on from scratch, or to even command a good salary while working at a good chamber. It is similarly very much possible to secure a well paying job with great growth opportunities at a good law firm or in-house legal team. However, that requires you to have some practical skills. What are these practical skills that you should learn to get the coveted jobs and then to perform like a champion? We have made a comprehensive list for you. I have taken these lists from our course manuals at LawSikho, where we try to inculcate these skills with each lesson and each exercise. I will come to details of how we manage to teach these skills later.

Here are 10 ultra-important skills that law schools do not teach you, but you must acquire in order to find early success in your legal career:

• The ability to find, understand and analyse any law whatsoever
• The ability to put an argument or a point across in writing or through a speech
• The ability to draft and negotiate contracts
• The ability to come up with a legal strategy or legal position given a specific situation, and the ability to advice clients regarding the same
• The ability to plan and manage a legal process efficiently from the beginning till a remedy is obtained or deal is closed. Also known as project management skill – every case or matter is a project after all.
• The ability to understand and support the commercial/pecuniary objectives of clients, as well as comprehensive understanding of business models, organizational models and business logic behind any transaction
• The ability to process a large amount of information to quickly arrive at what is important in any given situation
• The ability to invent a solution through creativity, but supported by legal analysis
• The ability to understand and implement procedural aspects of law with a very high level of attention to details (eg. deftly handling the registry of a court, or ensuring quick enforcement of a decree in a clogged legal system)
• The ability to represent the interests of an unrelated person dispassionately, coherently, only based on legal logic before an authority or another party

Law firm specific skills

(Some of these skills may appear as though they are similar or overlapping, but they may not be.)

• Understanding of the documentation, review and execution process
• Ability to communicate precisely, clearly and frequently with different stakeholders of the client through a mix of emails, conference and phone calls, including sharing legal or policy updates and their possible impact on the specific transaction or the client’s business generally
• Ability to interact with regulators and their staff to identify practical roadblocks and interpretations of regulatory provisions for a transaction
• Ability to interact effectively with non client parties (they don’t pay you) such as the investee company (in case you are engaged by the acquirer)
• Ability to collaborate within a hierarchical team
• Ability to break the work down in appropriate units and delegate to juniors and interns to mentor them and to enhance output
• Ability to understand the client’s eventual outcomes and incorporate that in the documentation process and strategy without specific instruction each time
• Ability to identify concerns and “what-ifs” from time to time as a multi-legged transaction evolves over time and take initiative to present workable solutions for the client
• Ability to give high quality, super-specialised advice
• Ability to conduct due diligence exercises efficiently
• Presentation of the client’s factual data, goals, legal and regulatory provisions together in clear ways to give clear opinion to the client of what is possible, what is not and how to achieve the results the client wants  
• Knowledge and skills related to specific practice areas (Investment transactions, M&A, finance and banking deals, general corporate, projects, Technology Media & Telecom, dispute resolution etc)

In-house legal team specific skills

• Ability to support various business functions in a company (eg. sales, marketing, R&D, Board of Directors, promoters) through legal advice, contracts and other legal work
• Ability to build, manage and lead a team of lawyers and support stuff
• Ability to instruct and manage external lawyers
• Ability to track and manage specific outcomes of legal contracts and ensuring that the company gets what it bargained for
• Ability to visualize standardized legal documentation and policies to reduce risk and protect the company’s interests
• Ability to prepare and maintain different kinds of dashboards to report compliance and other strategic inputs for the management
• Ability to identify the right local lawyers in different courts in multiple states and districts to engage for different kind of matters
• Ability to have working relationship with different kinds of senior counsels to engage in appellate matters, writs and special leave petitions
• Ability to engage law firms at a suitable price point for the company which provide required services

Litigation specific skills

• Filing skills and dealing with the court registry
• How to strategize the prayer and the most suitable interim remedies to protect the client’s interest and secure early relief
• Drafting pleadings, applications and petitions
• Counselling clients about legal strategy
• Briefing senior counsels and collaboration with other litigators who are looking at other parts of the case
• Ability to create and manage an effective team that supports your practice –  juniors and court clerks for your work at different forums
• Creation of case strategy – which facts and interpretations should be used in which forum and which facts should be ignored to present your case in the best light
• General investigation skills –  to find out facts and gather evidence to build a strong case
• Project management skills – every case is a project that requires professional management
• Ability to ensure through effective communication that a client experiences value and satisfaction through your work (most litigators do great work but have no time to communicate the value to a client and the client often experiences unavailability of the litigator and a high level of uncertainty in the matter)

How should we teach law in that case?

If the current legal education system is repeatedly failing, year after year, to provide training to law graduates that make them employable or ready for the legal industry, what can be done about it? This is exactly why my co-founder, Abhyuday, and I started platforms like iPleaders and LawSikho.

Here is why there is a legal education-employment bottleneck – every law student and young lawyer needs to thoroughly understand this.

I spoke about the bottleneck and the skill deficit in this article here, too.

Before I tell you how we go about it, let me tell you how we did it wrong for years despite identifying the right problem.

Biggest drawback of online education

If I give you a manual for swimming, and then you learn it by heart, and then I ask you to take an exam. You clear it with flying colours. Now, I give you a certificate with glowing swimming credentials. However, will you be willing to jump into the sea based on this knowledge?

The problem with online legal courses is the same. While law colleges failed to offer reasonable skill training, online courses commit a worse crime – they promise to fill the gap and then don’t.

We had anticipated the problem, and tried to bridge the gap through lucidly written material, videos, live webinars, question answer forums. However, year after year we saw that despite significantly improving our material, interface and engagement, a large number of students who buy online courses never finish the same. A majority of them appear for the exam, get the certificate, and still a large chunk do not even bother to do that.

That made us wonder – what could be the reason?

Law is hard. There is no denying that. It’s complex no matter how easy the language we use and how many mindmaps we create. It requires a lot of attention. It requires time. It requires discipline. And a lot of learners drop off somewhere, and simply give up. Many others just focus on somehow finishing the course, getting the certificate.

This is very concerning for us. It is true that we take the money upfront, and no matter how many people drop off we still had a steady flow of students. We always got a minimum of 10-20% success stories. A portion of the students always consist of diligent and disciplined students who properly finish the course, do all the assignments, follow instructions, get the mentorship they wanted in the first place, and bag amazing internship and job opportunities. They also spread the positive word of mouth about how much our courses helped them. That always attract more good students to come and take up our courses.

Still, 50-60% students failed to significantly benefit from the courses they paid for. This was our failure. Also, these people are likely to say negative things about the course. A few times I got comments that the course is not good enough or does not provide enough value for money. Then as concerned as I would be, I always find the number of such people and then call them up. Usually they turn out to be people who haven’t done our course or a student who enrolled but did not have the perseverance to go through the hard part of the course. While we understood that this is an online course, and we cannot chase people to complete their online courses or finish their exercises, to give the proper time required, it meant that we will never become the extraordinary educational organization we dream of becoming.

100% success rate is the holy grail of education. Just think of what made IIMs or NLS Bangalore famous. It was the 100% good placements! To reach that level, we have to ensure despite being an online education platform, we have to create 100% success rate.

Is that even possible? Probably not. However, to become a world class education platform, and to fulfill our ambition, we had to improve our game. The job of dreamers, entrepreneurs and hustlers is to turn the impossible into inevitable. So we started to figure that out. It took years of effort because we hit a solution that works.

What could be the solution? What do you think?

Here is what we do.

Provide study material ‘filled with insights’ for self study

We only care about actionable insights that can move you towards accomplishing an objective or arriving at a solution. We skip all the commentaries on sections, cases laws and jargons and cut to the chase, and answer practical questions you will have to deal with. Consider the following sets of questions:

Set 1

• How can you do X?
• When should you do Y?
• What is the most optimal method to achieve Z outcome?
• How can you save costs while accomplishing A?
• How can you do B in the most expeditious manner?

Set 2

• What is the history and origin of a particular concept?
• What are the drawbacks of the definition in the statute?
• Was a particular case correctly decided?
• What is the difference between the judgments of different courts on a particular point?

Do you notice the difference between the two sets of questions? The kind of discussion that the first set of questions provokes is relevant to immediate reality, while that provoked by the second set of questions is academic. More people want and will be willing to pay you to get answers to the first set of questions.

Answering the second set of questions is not always as important, unless it helps us arrive at a desired outcome, or avoid an undesired outcome in reality. In fact, if you are interested, once you know how to answer the first set of questions, you can answer the second set on your own.

We are more interested in identification of how to achieve real life solutions and inquire into what the law is from that perspective.

This makes our courses lightweight, easy to study, and directly beneficial. Compared to a textbook, every hour you spend on this material gives you a lot more RoI (Return on Investment) and it is also easier to follow. Also, reading this material or watching the video is only a small part of the course. The real amazing part is the exercises and live classes, I will come to that next.

Self-study material that is capable of application

Most lawyers (even in big firms) do not have a habit of using detailed systems and processes (unless the firm provides them something in an exceptional case), with the result that there can be inconsistency in your work. If you draft 5 contracts every day, you might find that the contracts vary in content, uniformity and even quality. Any risks owing to a missing clause may not be discovered right then, but years later when there is a dispute. In fact, if you use a compare function, you will find differences.

We create study materials which are not just knowledge-based but can be used repeatedly to improve your quality of work and reliability in real-life. For example, in the Contract Drafting Diploma, we share an exhaustive checklist consisting of more than 25 clauses that ensures that every contract you draft is exhaustive.

Let’s take another example. We suggest lawyers to share an Information Requisition Form with clients when they want transaction-specific details about a contract from a client to capture detailed information accurately into the contract. Recently, one of our students who is a working professional pre-filled this and shared the form on his own initiative with his lawyer. The lawyer was surprised and moved at how it made his work easier – he had never seen a client share something like this.

Our intention here is that you grow yourself by using systematic methods of learning from the starting. If you do it for sufficient time, you will be able to build your own methods, systems and processes in new situations to get results you want. It will also make delegation more effective in future, when you decide to build a team, hire or groom juniors. 

Weekly exercises

The standard model of learning where a teacher gives a lecture in a class has a crucial drawback:

• It does not require you to apply the knowledge you are learning
• It puts your brain in a passive mode, so you may not always be thinking on your feet when you receive the knowledge

There is evidence of it at play – many of us love acquiring ‘gyaan’ but find it difficult to apply it. That’s not your fault, it’s because of how you have been conditioned!

We realized that there has to be minimal friction between acquiring knowledge and its application, otherwise the acquisition of knowledge and its application become two unconnected and uphill tasks.

We decided to provide simulation exercises every week that mimic the most-common and frequent (though not easy, some are fairly complex) situations someone would face in real life. When you solve these problems every week, your experience of knowledge acquisition and knowledge application is direct and connected. There is no friction. As a result, you acquire highly personalized insights which enable you to apply the learning repeatedly and with reliability in a future situation. Your brain says, “I have done this before”. You’ve been there and done that.  

Live feedback classes

We have been providing access to recorded videos and interactions with experts since 2012, but you are the observer there. We realized that personalized feedback is important, and this part of online education needs to be repeated for every batch of students.

We conduct weekly classes that give you feedback for the previous exercise you performed, and teach you relevant concepts for the next week’s exercise. From the feedback you and others get, you are able to identify multiple ways to improve and incorporate real-life situations in a contract.

This is important because in real life, you do not have only one correct answer. There can be multiple ways of approaching and solving a problem and achieving the same result. These feedback sessions enable you to see that happen, because different people tackle problems differently.

In one month, people who were mortified of writing contracts have started feeling confident and drafting fairly good clauses.  

Micro-Skills

We observed experts in action, and we realized that they all apply multiple sets of skills which they have acquired over time to arrive at a solution. When you face a real situation, the reason you find it complex and others don’t is because experts have a wider set of skills to choose from, sequence and combine, to get the result. In fact, that is the reason why your seniors at work can solve some problems very easily but you as a fresher cannot. Most of us who are good with performing tasks even turn blind to the fact that they have a lot more experience and practice than others.

We have drilled down to the most fundamental micro-skills involved in performing a task, and created exercises with the intention to impart these micro-skills. Gradually, these build in complexity. From time to time, students are also provided more complex exercises to give them the opportunity to apply different sets of micro-skills together.

In fact, an entrepreneur had once approached someone who was pursuing higher studies in cyber law to draft terms and conditions and privacy policies. She had then refused as she had had no real world exposure, but is now confident of taking up such work.