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

I was speaking to a final year law student who reached out to me yesterday. 

I have been writing about why law students should focus on working with startups as a very serious growth path and lucrative opportunity. 

She wanted to know how she could work for a startup.

How much time do you have? 

My exams will be over in 3 months, and then I need to join a job. 

Great, that’s not a lot of time, but can be worked out. What are the skills you have? 

There are three major skills you need to successfully work at a startup. Contract drafting, compliances, and managing disputes. As you grow in your role, later on strategy and advising your business teams on how to gain competitive advantage becomes a more valuable skill.

But to start with, contract drafting and compliances are minimum viable skillset to join a startup and add value to the organization. If you can’t do these things, and even if you manage to bag a job, you are likely to get fired in a few months. 

Turns out the only skill the person on the phone had was legal research. Surely, that’s a valuable and important skill. But is that enough on its own to work as a lawyer for a startup?

I don’t think so.

At best it qualifies you to be an unpaid or severely underpaid intern, who may or may not prove to be useful over the months, depending on her ability to learn and grow in her job.

Can she learn contract drafting and compliances on her own? Maybe. Some people do. 

Employers do not really like to invest in such employees. And this is why, they stay far away from freshers, and prefer to hire lawyers with at least a few years of experience. It’s better to not hire a lawyer than having a clueless lawyer in your payroll. 

But why should you be clueless when you are graduating as a lawyer, holding a license to practice law? If your college failed to equip you with marketable skills, why are you not getting them from elsewhere?

Where do freshers get the experience and skill and practical knowledge in the normal course? They have to work under some lawyer, working as an apprentice, trying to learn by observation and trial and error. 

That is all fine if you do not need to earn much right off the bat. If you can afford to spend first 3-5 years of your career learning and getting paid very little, no problem. 

Or if you have earned tremendous pedigree due to your elite educational background that some big law firm or huge MNC with a massive legal team and bandwidth to train you will take you on and pay a decent salary, that is good enough, too. It is a viable starting point. It is rare but possible. 

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And even when it comes to getting into such an organization, someone who educates themselves about practical knowledge on their own, beforehand, will have a huge upper hand. 

It is a different thing that such organizations also put you under massive pressure – to swim or to sink.

In reality, nobody has the patience to pay you lots of money while you learn the work on their time. If you try to learn from someone while you also want them to pay you well, such endeavors will always cost you dearly, in one way or the other.

It is far better to equip yourself to add value to people, prove your worth and merit-based on your performance, and then demand your fair price.  

Unless of course, you are one of the highly privileged people in the legal world. If that is the case, you may be able to bend the rules of engagement. You may find law firms and lawyers willing to hire you and teach you, or family members helping you to learn and grow in the profession out of affection and personal relationship. 

The rest of us have to come up the hard way. We need to learn as fast as we can, and we have to grow quickly so that we can stand on our feet and find ourselves in a growth trajectory rather than be rudderless ships stumbling from one organization or senior to another, hoping to find the right mentor. 

And that is the problem we solve at LawSikho. We built this organization in order to provide a viable alternative to spending years learning form seniors by trial and error and observation. We speed up the learning by around 300% on average and provide a safe space to learn the skills that make the biggest difference in your career without being judged by your colleagues or clients.

Even if you are not a young lawyer, but someone accomplished in one area of law and want to learn new areas of law rapidly in order to grow your practice, what are your options? 

LawSikho offers courses that speed up your learning, makes the process super efficient and pleasant, and you focus on growing while we focus on the logistics of learning and training. 

And the RoI we are able to deliver is tremendous. I frequently hear from our students about the amazing breakthroughs they are causing, the jobs they bagged, the clients they impressed and the promotions they achieved.

We are building a revolution in legal learning, something far beyond any law school in this country ever imagined. We measure our success in terms of the income our students generate, not in terms of how many people enroll or graduate. 

Why? Because that is the real indicator of the value we generate. Don’t people look at the placement record of law schools before taking admission? Why should we not focus our full might on that? 

We are fully shifting to this model going forward, where we will be focussing all our efforts on training in a way that our learners increase their gross income. Not the first salary, not how many people got a job or a client, but how much were they able to increase their salary thanks to our courses? We are devising ways to have our students report the same to us in ethical ways. 

Do you know any other educational organization that thinks like that?

We are clear, every student who joins us must get 10x benefits compared to what they pay us. That is how we expect to grow and become a force to reckon with in the education industry as well as the legal industry. 

So here is what we are doing. We are connecting over 1000 disruptive startups that are growing fast, across 24 sectors, such as biotech, artificial intelligence & machine learning, fintech, data mining, media and entertainment, drones, e-commerce, 3d printing, SaaS & enterprise software developers, foodtech, medtech, edutech, co-living & co-working etc. 

We are building a database of 4000+ internships that we plan to offer to students and recent graduates we work with, in the coming 6 months. The terms are simple, first month is no-stipend, no-risk assessment internship for the law student/law graduate (this makes sense only to recent graduates who are earning very little or nothing at all). If their work is good, the startup agrees to extend long term paid internship/ work from home opportunities/ retainership/full-time job offer. 

We would also use the same database and our learnings from these startups to extend business development and client work opportunities to our other students – the lawyers who don’t need internships but senior level jobs or more clients from their existing practices.

Most of the startups I spoke to were extremely happy to extend opportunities on these terms and experiment on this model. However, I also know if the first few interns are not up to the mark, they will never try it again, and we will lose a golden opportunity. 

However, the harder part has not been finding internships but actually finding high-quality interns who have sufficient skills to get the work done. It is taking us at least 3-6 months to make a law student capable enough to be able to do the work we want them to do.

I told the final year student who called me about an opportunity. I invited her to join a course that will help her to bag a good job with one of these startups, with our assistance and training. Let’s see if she takes me up on this offer. 

But here is the thing: it is incredible how much opportunity is out there, waiting for you to capitalize on it. Only if you stop rushing with the crowd and bother to look for opportunities where the crowd has not reached yet! Only if you make yourself capable of taking advantage of those opportunities, by investing in your skills and knowledge! Only if you understand that by doing what everyone else is doing you can only hope for below average results, and to do better than average you need to have skills far beyond what the average person can hope for! 

What is possible? What could become possible?

Join any of our courses, and let us prepare you to grab your fair share of opportunities. You will see the difference within 2 weeks, that is our promise. No kidding, you even have a 30 days money-back guarantee from us to rely on:

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Diploma in Cyber Law, Fintech Regulations and Technology Contracts

Diploma in Advanced Contract Drafting, Negotiation and Dispute Resolution

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