This summary is written by Aarchie Chaturvedi, from National University of Study & Research in Law, Ranchi.

This was in-conversation with a first-generation lawyer, Mr. Abhijay Negi, who did his under-graduation in law from NLUJ, won the Best Law Student of India Award and got 100 percent scholarship for pursuing a bachelor’s course in civil law from the Oxford University. The session was moderated by Ms. Sammanika Rawat, Head of Placements at LawSikho. She is an internationally accredited Mediator. Apart from this, she has worked in the Infrastructure and Banking Project fields as a corporate lawyer and has been a proud environmentalist at the grassroots level.

The following are the questions that Mr. Negi answered during the course of the webinar.

• How did he prepare for CLAT?

-He started with the preparation of current affairs through newspapers and other resources. He tried to keep a tab on everything going on, in and around the world, particularly in India. He even joined a crash course program after his 12th to prepare for CLAT. It was his immense knowledge in the GK section that sailed him through the exam with flying colours.

• How did he win the Rs 1 Lakh- Damodarshree Shree National Award Cash Prize in the first year of college?

-During his college days, he always stayed up to date with the information provided on the notice board. He figured out that it is not very necessary for him to work in a conventional manner. He realized that he can even make a different path for himself by just staying acquainted with what’s on the notice board and that’s how he won the Damodarshree Shree National Award for academic excellence.

• How did he achieve the Tata Nano Student of the Year second runner prize?

-He diligently filled the application form for the program. There were some group discussions after which he was called to Mumbai for the final round. The final round, to his surprise, was a talent round. He was among the top 8 students across the country who qualified for that round. He did well in that round and thus ended up being the runners up for this competition. He won a Macro Pro Laptop as a prize for the contest. This incident taught him to keep experimenting with the different options in law school.

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• How did he, being at Jodhpur, structured and conducted Uttarakhand’s strongest pocket money funded, a student-run peer pressure group ‘Making a Difference’ in Dehradun?

-He started this initiative before taking up law as a career. After he went to NLUJ, he even speculated upon the fact of closing the organization as it was getting cumbersome for him to run the organization then. However, he thanks his peer group and the volunteers who joined the organization in 2011/12. Those people helped the student movement to gradually become stable and more credible.

• How he managed to top the batch without ever spending much time in the college library?

-He had a very strong support system in and outside law school which helped him stay sane. He was giving a lot of time and attention to the student movement going on in Dehradun. He was somehow able to manage things because of the support systems both in Dehradun & Jodhpur.

People used to ask him for notes when he performed decently in-class tests. He had a shabby writing and people used to think that he secretly made intelligible notes in his room and that’s why he wasn’t found in the library where toppers of other batches were present.

He even realized a funny trend during his law school days. He felt that while he was not doing any kind of multi-tasking and channelizing his energy into different kinds of competition, he fared rather badly at academics.

However, he believes he had positive influences around him which kept him on his toes and enabled him to excel in every field. 

• How did he manage to skip the rat race of interning at law firms? Why did he choose to pursue a career in Constitutional law when he had attractive offers from the Corporate Sector? (both questions answered here in brief)

-Corporate Law/ Corporate work did not interest him. The idea of sitting at a place and working for hours stupefied him. But he feels when you are a litigator you are your own man. You are independent irrespective of whether you lose or win. He acknowledged that he had to face pressure when he was not doing internships during law school. But his belief that with perseverance and hard work he would sail through his dreams made him stay adamant about what he wanted to do. 

Some key takeaways from the session:

-While it is true that if you have a brand of an NLU behind you it makes a huge difference and there is an added onus on someone who doesn’t have that brand, to extra shine or do something more than an average NLU-ite would have to do. “But that is where,” he says, “someone can pitch in with their extra hard work & smart work and can still make it to any place in the world”

-He believes that the motivation behind stepping out of that rat race has to come from the very first step of stepping out of the rat race and once you take that step you can do anything you wish for.

-If you are born poor it’s not your mistake, but if you die, poor, it’s your mistake.

-He feels that there are some conventional myths like you need to do a lot of moots for the purpose of CV-building, or you need to write a multiple number of research papers. He, however, tries to bust those myths by emphasizing the point that quantity does not matter but quality does. “Do that research” he says, “that makes you drown you into an ocean of knowledge for a year or so and then come out with a paper.”

-“You have to enjoy whatever you do in life.”

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