This article is written by Komal Shah, Content Head & Co-founder, LawSikho.

What keeps you running, day after day?

What do you run after? What do you chase? 

How do you manage to get up on a day when you can do it no more?

From where do you derive the strength to do it?

Locomotives are fuelled by petrol or electricity. Athletes are fuelled by energy drinks. 

I don’t know all the answers that may work for you, but I want to share how we do this. 

We are fuelled by the success of our students, who then go on to light their own torches towards change. We will just go on relentlessly pushing, guiding, mentoring and waking law students and professionals to a solid career growth. 

On countless occasions, people have asked me, Ramanuj, Abhyuday or Harsh to teach them a subject. They think we are the experts. They think that if we were to teach them a whole subject, it would do the magic for them.

That, by the way, is NOT the full Lawsikho experience. While we individually take sessions and get on personal phone calls from time to time to mentor our students, it still does not substitute for the real deal. One individual cannot deliver the whole experience.

When you join a LawSikho course, the whole machinery of the organisation gets behind you and has this collective will (mind you, it is a will, not a hope) that you succeed. This includes classes by practitioners, feedback from the evaluators, guidance from the writing coaches to publish your articles and the study materials prepared by 10-20 experts for each course. With each step and each interaction, you grow. Our existing students can vouch for that. 

There is a science behind why this method works. I am sharing this with you, so that you can replicate it. 

Focus on the ‘doing’ in addition to ‘knowing’

Long ago before we had the IRCTC website, people used to queue up at stations to book train tickets. Where you booked multiple train tickets, you had to fill up a form. I used to travel frequently between Ahmedabad and Mumbai and hence, needed to book a lot of train tickets in advance. Once, my mom was traveling with me. So I booked both of our tickets and went back to my dad. One look at the ticket and he told me that the seat number for my mother would be the ‘side upper’ berth (my dad was an even more frequent traveller). People who travel by train would probably know that ‘side upper’ berths are the most uncomfortable places to be at night if you are past your teen ages and above 5.5” in height. My dad turned to me and said “You knew you could fill up ‘LB preferred’ (meaning prefer lower berth, typically used for people who find it uncomfortable to climb) in the form, didn’t you? Why did you not use it? What benefit is it for you to know this, if you could not apply it at the right time?” 

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That incident left a mark on me. The reason I did not apply my knowledge was because I wasn’t used to my mom traveling with me. It just didn’t strike me at that time to fill that up in the form. I could not foresee, because I hadn’t felt that pinch before. My dad could foresee, because he had felt that pinch. He had been in the situation. 

Knowledge does not give you the ability to apply the knowledge. The ability to apply it is completely different. It comes when you face the situation yourself, when responsibility rests upon you. 

Just check out the learning objectives of any of our courses. These are designed to make you feel the pinch of handling an assignment (without being actually pinched, of course), so you can foresee a lot of troubles that may come your way and deal with these even before they arise. These act so that you will not miss the ‘LB preferred’ in your forms.

In our courses, we encourage people to do things – for example, in a real estate course, we will encourage people to go out, secure and read the bye laws of the cooperative society they live in, go and sit with a real estate agent and understand what kind of financing schemes builders provide (checking if there is a RERA registration certificate displayed in the meanwhile), talk to relatives who recently bought/sold/leased/rented and ask how the deal was structured and if they will share the transaction documents for you to read etc. 

In an M&A course, we will ask you to check out the actual term sheets that investors have on their websites and identify what works for a founder in those term sheets and what doesn’t.

This doing actually enables people to develop repeatable skills which they can use in future.

Get into the head of entrepreneurs / ask the same questions your client will ask

We will continue to groom you to switch bodies – do a ‘kayapalat’. You can become entrepreneurs and think like how they think. Then you can become lawyers again and think of how to deal with how entrepreneurs think. 

Remember your clients are not lawyers (it’s amazing how rapidly we forget this). Their objectives are not about how to ensure compliance with law. They are bothered about how to grow their business without landing in a soup with the law. In addition to helping them comply, if lawyers also care about how they can grow their clients’ businesses, no client will want to leave you. This is like legal advice bordering on management consultancy. 

We will ask you 10 questions your client can ask you. These 10 + 10 + 10…. and so on will grill you and groom you in such a way that you will now be able to predict what the client will be interested in. We bring simulated exercises to you. Our objective is that slowly, you are able to build such simulations for yourself. That is the method we ourselves use to take courses to the cutting edge. 

For example, if your client were a foreign company, you would eventually be able to think in terms of whether it should route its investment in India through FDI, through technical collaborations, through service level agreements or through external commercial borrowings.

Bring problems faced by the industry to your doorstep

We get in touch with people who are on the front, fighting daily with problems in the specific sector. We get their daily grind and struggle and we bring this to you. We do not just talk to the lawyers – we talk to the business people, CXOs and the clients themselves, to find the pain points they face. We identify the pain points that are unresolved currently by lawyers. This makes our course syllabi really novel and comprehensive. 

Interestingly, I am reminded of a conversation in the early stages of my career with a gentleman who questioned me thus (while comparing homemakers and women working out of their homes) “So you think you earn a lot? My wife (who is a homemaker) goes to 10 different shops and makes a value buy in everything. She saves far more money than you earn!” 

While I appreciated his stance of valuing his wife highly, I was quite intrigued with his comparison between women who chose to work outside their homes and women who didn’t. I told him patiently “That’s great! So if I ask your wife for guidance on where to make a value buy, she will help me, right?”

I was looking at getting value from someone else’s grind. I could then move to larger goals. You can do this too. Get benefit from the experts’ struggles. We bring these to you. 

Prefer ‘being understood’ to ‘being learned’

We love vocabulary. Really. But we detest jargon. We hate it if someone tells us it took them effort to understand the contents of our courses. We don’t want to be ‘learned’. We would rather be plain, simple and understandable. 

We also want you to develop your writing skills so that your clients understand you and trust you enough. 

Plus, jargon is not very acceptable outside of India (see here for my LinkedIn post where I have written about what happened when out of my conditioning, I ended up using jargon in one of my roles out of India). So if you are stepping out into the borderless world that has more or less arrived, I’d say groom yourself to write in a manner where you can be easily understood.

This is at the basis of our teaching methodology, but you do not benefit fully from the method, unless you get the whole experience. One or two of us individually cannot deliver it.  

So now you know what we keep on rooting for. 

You can create this same environment for yourself and follow this method to develop expertise in any area you want. You will need to be willing enough to put in the man hours necessary on your own.

However, in the meanwhile, if you choose to make LawSikho root for your success, feel free to pick up any of the following courses below:

DIPLOMA 

Diploma in Business Laws for In House Counsels

Diploma in Companies Act, Corporate Governance and SEBI Regulations

EXECUTIVE CERTIFICATE COURSES

Certificate Course in Advanced Corporate Taxation

Certificate Course in Trademark Licensing, Prosecution and Litigation

Certificate Course in Advanced Civil Litigation: Practice, Procedure and Drafting

Certificate Course In Competition Law, Practice And Enforcement