This article is written by  Abhyuday Agarwal, COO,  LawSikho.

The news is out. The Indian economy grew 4.5% between July to September, 2019 (see here). 

In comparison, the Core CPI inflation in September 2019 was 3.99% (see Business Standard story here). By the way, the average inflation in India is usually around 8-10%, if you take everything into consideration like healthcare and rent.

What does this mean? 

If you have money in the bank, it is going to lose at least 4% of its value every year. Probably more.

Get that? Your savings is going down in value. I am sure you do not want that. You want your money to grow in value, not go down.

It can go up only if you invest the money somewhere where you get high returns. Higher the return, and lower the risks, the better. 

Where can you invest? 

Let us examine some of the popular options for investment and their feasibility. 

FD rates have been lowered in November – you will earn anywhere between 4.5% to 6.75% (see here), without adjusting for inflation. If you adjust for inflation, net growth will be around 2-3%. 

Another option is to invest in stocks and mutual funds. By the way, the stock market has been extremely unpredictable in the past 6 months. The top indices are trading at an extremely high valuation. Most fund managers do not expect the market to go up much higher from here sustainably. Here is what Citigroup’s Surendra Goyal thinks. Ramanuj, for example, has stopped his SIPs for a while because he is expecting a market crash.

Given this scenario, if you save money, it will lose 4% or it will grow at 2-5% after adjusting for inflation if you invest it. The growth is minuscule. If you invest in stocks, you could see major erosion of your capital in the short or medium term.

So where do we invest our savings?

Here’s one thing you should know about money. Money grows, but it does not grow exponentially. 

It does not grow like amoeba, which can divide itself. Amoeba, given the right environment, will grow from 1 to 2, 2 to 4, 4 to 8, 8 to 16 and 16 to 32, in five instances of division. Even if each division takes one year, in five years, amoeba will grow 32 times. 

The growth of money, on the other hand, is severely constrained by the base amount you start out with. Assume that your money compounds 10% year on year. If you start out with Rs. 100, at 10% per year compound interest, it will grow into 110, 121, 133, 146 and 161 in 5 years.   

In other words, in 5 years, whatever money you start out with, grows 61%, at 10% compound interest. It hasn’t even doubled! 

However, if you give it 20, or 30 years, number can look a lot better. 

Most investment opportunities may not give a realistic return of more than 10% compound interest in today’s times. Even if you assume the growth rate to be 15%, the principal amount will only double in 5 years.  

Unless you have a legacy of a few crores, this kind of growth in your funds will not increase your fortunes significantly to meet expenses, or to maintain your lifestyle. 

Click Above

In fact, if your savings are any lesser than a few crores, there are chances that you will fall very short of meeting the expenses for your changing needs over the years if you try to live off the interest alone and spare the capital. 

You don’t have to be a greedy person for your needs to increase. Very basic needs can completely evaporate your savings. 

For example, purchasing a house, a car, providing funds for a medical emergency in your family, marriage, maintaining your parents, etc. can all wipe out your funds.

For many of you, these expenses may not be in your immediate radar right now, but they come up faster than expected. 

Now, tell me, who is going to be positioned to deal with this situation? Someone who saves whatever money he or she has, or someone who can grow exponentially like amoeba with that money?

Someone who can grow exponentially like an amoeba, right? 

You may ask me, “Isn’t it too much to expect that of a human being?” 

It could be. You might think it is unfair, but that is the way it is.

Of course, everyone does not grow so fast today, not because they cannot, but because they have never even thought about it. Probably, that is the reason why so many people are resigned about their career. 

So many of you work hard, earn a lot, save what they can, and yet they find themselves incapable of meeting the needs of life. 

Why is that? Because the growth rate is too slow in the short and medium term.

We need to, therefore, find out how we can grow like amoeba.

Not in terms of our population, but in our skills, in the quantum of value we add to our clients, in terms of our contribution to the world. 

We can increase our skills exponentially. We can increase our branding exponentially. We can increase our productivity exponentially, in terms of how much we charge for per hour or per day’s work. 

A lawyer who starts by charging INR. 5000 per contract may end up charging INR 1,00,000 a few years down the line if he can build a brand. A lawyer in a law firm might be charging crores for a complicated M&A deal, as you can see from here.

Ram Jethmalani had reportedly charged Rs 1 crore in retainership and Rs 22 lakh for each appearance in the court to defend Arvind Kejriwal when he was sued by Arun Jaitley for defamation. 

It is not uncommon for senior lawyers to charge 1 lakh+ per appearance in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore or such markets. When I had to enquire in Kolkata to hire senior lawyers for a matter this year, all top lawyers were charging INR 80,000 upwards for appearing in High Court and even more to appear in district courts! 

What if you could invest your money to take yourself to that position? Can money help you to speed up learning, branding and your standing in the legal fraternity?

Now that’s a real exponential growth of investment if you ever saw one. 

I am not limiting this idea to monetary or material pursuits alone. If you want to save the Earth by arresting climate change, if you are to stand a chance, your forces and efforts will have to grow like amoeba.

After reading this, you might be motivated to work hard so that you can grow like an amoeba.  

Don’t even try. 

Putting in hard work alone is insufficient to grow that fast. Even if you work for one hour per day, you cannot increase your output 32 times by hard work alone, because you would need 32 hours for that, and you have only 24. All of those can’t be productive hours.

But isn’t putting in hard work the best we can do? 

Not at all. 

You need to rely on your greatest gift, i.e. your mind. 

It is what has led to the progress of our civilization. You need to develop your mind. 

However, the mind does not grow in isolation from the real world. If you sit and ‘think’ about your life and your career, your mind does not grow. 

If you don’t believe me, you can try it. Let me know after 48 hours what happens.

The human mind grows when it consumes something, when it performs something, when it learns something, when it is given obstacles to overcome and pushed to its limits. 

Your mind needs to interact with something that inspires it, challenges it and demands excellence from it. Your mind needs a safe environment to debate, experiment and play around with something, to accomplish something. 

For exponential growth, your mind needs a series of tasks and missions to complete. It also needs a capable guide or coaches who can accelerate that growth.

Imagine trying to learn singing or how to play the guitar – a good teacher can massively accelerate how fast you pick up critical skills in the shortest possible time.

If you want to be a great lawyer, or use law in your work, you need to grow your mind in the same way. Because we believe in this, we have been creating a library of courses that have the single minded focus on increasing your earning potential and developing your mind so that you can be prepared to do the legal work in the market that has the highest RoI.

You can take up a Lawsikho Diploma Course and acquire 100 real world legal skills in that area that will earn you at least INR 10,000 per skill at the minimum. If it is a 3 month long executive certificate course, you would be learning at least 24 such new skills. 

You could also buy something like Master Access or Corporate Law Library or Litigation Library and get access to thousands of such skills, which you can learn over the next 5 years!

However, I speak to many people who say that they can learn all these by themselves. Of course, you can. The difference with us is the time you will spend to learn all these.

What a young litigator takes 3 years to learn from a senior lawyer, we teach as much in 6 months to 1 year to our students. 

What a lawyer in a big law firm takes 2 years to learn, we teach that in 1 year to a law student who wants to get a job at a big law firm.

What lawyers trying to build their own practice or a law firm takes 5 years to learn, we teach that in a matter of 1 year in our Legal Practice Development and Management course.

Do you want to reinvent the wheel by yourself, when you could just use the infrastructure we have already created, instead of focusing your energy on growing your practice or standing in the profession exponentially? 

The scientists of today could not develop spaceships on their own, if they could not rely on prior technological inventions of the airplane, the wheel and the steam engine.  

If they worked on reinventing the wheel, they would be stuck in a garage, not in NASA or ISRO.  

In other words, you need to start with what is available in the world and then grow. You do not grow by starting from scratch. 

Take another example, when mountaineers climb high mountains, they take oxygen cylinders with them to breathe when the pressure is low. They don’t practice breathing without oxygen on the ground.

Trying to learn how to be a great lawyer on your own in your law school, or as an independent litigator, is like learning to breathe in an atmosphere without oxygen when you already have oxygen cylinders available on sale.

Do you know what the oxygen cylinder for someone who wants to be a great lawyer is? 

Equivalent of oxygen cylinder for you is a deep understanding of what clients want, and how to provide the services accordingly in an efficient, predictable way. You can fine-tune this skill with practice and coaching. 

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said that the biggest challenge is not raising money (Amazon raised equity and debt multiple times from several investors and geographical markets), but deciding how to spend that money. 

If you are facing a financial crisis, saving what you have, or living minimally is a starting point, but it will not make you rich unless you begin to invest.

And the best place for a lawyer to invest in his own skills and growth of his practice, simply because there is such a huge headspace to grow!   

If you cannot ask your parents for money because they are facing a financial crisis and you feel guilty for asking them, ask yourself whether this approach is helpful. What if you focused on learning the skills and increase your income instead? What if you could find some side gigs to earn money even while you are a student? 

If you help them save some money by not taking up a Lawsikho course that could help you get the job you want, get new clients, or build a practice, how much will that saving grow? 

At 15% compound interest, Rs. 30,000 will grow to about INR 60,000 in 5 years. INR 1 lakh will grow to INR 2,01,000 in 5 years.

How much could you earn if you invested that money in your own professional growth? You could earn 1 lakh from a single client for handling sensitive litigation or 15,000 for drafting a single commercial contract.

Can you see yourself earn 10,000 more per month if you learn what we are teaching? What if we taught you how to find clients and how to score side gigs? Would that be a better investment of your money than saving it and putting it into a bank or stock market?

Your career is a better investment any day.

If you take Master Access for INR 120,000, acquire 10 new clients in one year, can you grow your earnings by INR 6 lakhs in the first year? You just have to charge an average of INR 60,000 per client. 

If they refer 10 more clients in the next year (which is highly likely if you serve them well), can you grow your practice by another INR 10 lakhs in the second year?

If you grow at this rate, where could it take your practice, your earnings and your savings in five years? Master Access grants you unlimited access for 5 years to all our courses.  

You don’t need to become Jethmalani or partner in a big law firm to justify this investment. It is not at all hard for a lawyer with good skills to earn 1 lakh per month. I have even written a whole book of 400+ page about it, which you can get here for free if you haven’t read yet.

Does this return on investment make the expenditure worth it for you? Does it enable you to earn the funds to meet your needs and deal with emergencies? 

This logic does not apply to Master Access alone. Even if you take up a Lawsikho Diploma or Executive Certificate course, the chances of recruitment, number of offers you get, your starting salary or your growth path, dramatically increase. 10x is the minimum value we promise.   

We back our claims with a money back guarantee. You can try out any of our premium products or course libraries and get 100% refund between the 30th and 45th day if you 

Your actions can be responsible for turning around the fate of your family and definitely for your finance.

Here are the courses in which enrollment will close tonight:

DIPLOMA

Diploma in Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Laws

Diploma in Advanced Contract Drafting, Negotiation and Dispute Resolution

Diploma in Cyber Law, Fintech Regulations and Technology Contracts

EXECUTIVE CERTIFICATE COURSES

Certificate Course in Labour, Employment and Industrial Laws for HR Managers

Certificate Course in Capital Markets, Securities Laws, Insider Trading and SEBI Litigation

Certificate Course in Media and Entertainment Law: Contracts, Licensing and Regulations

Certificate Course in Prevention of Sexual Harassment at the Workplace

Students of Lawsikho courses regularly produce writing assignments and work on practical exercises as a part of their coursework and develop themselves in real-life practical skill.