This article is written by Veena Chandra, a student of NUSRL, Ranchi.

The Speaker 

Subhro Sengupta 

He has graduated from Hidayatullah National Law University, Raipur in the year 2016, and has worked in the various firms  and has acquired great experience in VC / M&A / Banking & Finance practice of the firm and advising start-ups and Indian and foreign funds on early-stage investments / M&A and banks and NBFC’s on debt transactions. He had also worked with Kalaari and Kstart as an Early-stage investment professional and worked across on sourcing, evaluating and executing early-stage investments in tech first startups. Currently, he is working with Udaan as a part of the Strategic Investments and Special Projects team at Udaan.

The Host 

Abhyuday Agarwal 

He is has graduated from West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences in the year 2011 and is  Co-Founder and COO of LawSikho, iPleaders and Superlawyer.net and currently heads the content team and liaise with subject matter experts, look into online delivery of Lawsikho’s courses and select relationships with technology vendors and university or industry collaborators. He also helps the companies and organizations to manage legal learning needs for their internal teams.

Question 1: Since you have mentored various people from different areas and you have motivated lawyers to move out of such practices can you give a brief insight on the same?

Answer 1: So basically when you cover a long distance as a sort of non-lawyer the thing is that it starts to appear as a rocket science so when I started to think about doing a thing like this in my initial days I used to search for lawyers and who is also an international banker and I used to send them text messages to these people on LinkedIn and tried to make contact with them.

The very important thing about it is to speak to people who have actually done it before and because in order to move out the core lawyering requires a network and the connections in order to sustain yourself as a person in the job market.

Abhyuday – “Moving outlaw is actually a new kind of birth to the law, because if you talk to persons who were lawyers in 60s, 70s or 80s then they would tell you what it was then and what it is now, what it was to be a barrister you know and go to court and argue and if you tell them about the corporate law then they will say that it is not an actual law and how will you argue in it and all sorts of things. Hence it’s not advisable to call this development as moving out of law rather it should be called as Moving into business codes”.

Subhro – Adding to this as a junior in any profession there is obviously a lot of uncertainty involved with it and the focus should be more on learning and actually figure out what you actually want while working in this position. If you decide to choose a particular field then you have to learn the technicalities of that field and understand it, even if you go to top tier law you won’t be excused from following the regular process of learning. You will anyhow go through the step by step process.

Question 2: What about the question that comes in the mind of the lawyers when they start operating in business especially the question on the relevancy of their degree of law because many of the time they do think that how them being  a lawyer will work out while entering this field?

Answer 2: So there are different kinds of people on kind of people are who think this but as a matter of fact, working as venture investor or fitting in the other business role does not require you to be a technician or an IITian but what actually is required to do this to have basic interest and understanding of the  business world and this should not really be a factor in questioning their degree which is a very wrong assumption to make just on the basis of what you perused in your undergrad degree.

Hence the choice should be a very well informed choice while entering into the business model. Some decisions which are made rashly might lead to some disadvantage in the later period of your career.

Question 3: What are the challenges to be a venture capital lawyer/ Venture capital investor?

Answer 3: So while working in the firms I had mostly worked in the venture capital and this gave a basic idea and a basic understanding of the VC Laws, not only this, in order to under Venture deals I moved to Bangalore because the scope of this was very vast and they are still growing so my understanding of the related field did get shaped from there and because this I did knew people from the industry and had the basic understanding of the industry and the process of fundraising the startups.

The basic part is that lawyers come into the picture at the time of execution which is the last stage in this process so one needs to understand the basic starting things that they need to do in order to understand this execution part. The prior knowledge in this field while working as a maybe ex-employee of a firm people actually understands your work because of your prior association to it. This gives them the basic idea of the quality that you might give in your deals. 

In order to add value to your work, you’ll have to work on things related to your field. Instead of wondering how this will work. 

Question 4: What Non-Technical skills set is required in order to follow this line of career path?

Answer 4: There is a myth Involving how the venture capitalists have to know the math in order to work out the benefits in the field but what is actually required is the basic understanding of the Ms Excel to work out the technicalities and other most important thing is the art of storytelling which we as law students and as now as a lawyers know and are still developing on it. The basic idea of such a thing is to enhance and develop the analyzing skills of the person.

Questions from the Audience 

Question 1: What are the other commercial roles that lawyers are best suited for?

Answer 1: So there are buying side roles and there’s sell roles. So in the buy-side role is basically you are buying an asset so for example venture investing and private equity which basically keeps increasing so venture and private equity are two roles and on the sell-side role, you can have investment banking. 

In addition to being a lawyer, there are various skill sets that are required as a background of commerce in a sense that once you walk into a room and say you know how to read a balance sheet from a maybe a simple online course it might be an added advantage from your side. Hence understanding the basic commercial aspect is very important while entering into this field.

There are various other roles as well, like Investment analyzer where the basic role is to work with the company and analyze securities and analyzing companies to invest in, Investment bank analyst where you are basically involved in the making pitches to people to buy a stock like a sell-side role which can also be an option and for any startup there is need of a person who can do the other the important work as generalists. 

There are so many operational as well like for example roles in communications, a public policy whose main aim is to advise the startups regarding the regulatory framework, which is a still developing and growing field of knowledge. 

Question 2: How do you see the growth of the Tech Industry, how do VC’s see legal tech and what is the limitation of being a legal tech or business in the process of raising funds?

Answer 2: Legal industry in India is limited to courts or firms etc where their  main motto is to provide justice to the people, individual or a company or anyone, hence there is a need on the part of people to understand the importance of legal tech as well because the aim of it won’t be to convince one lawyer to the other rather the aim of it will be to understand the legal industry in the form of the business model and which will motivate the VCs to invest in a legal tech startup. For example, a traffic sign startup is likely to get more funding than any normal startup because of its approach to the market since it is based on the legal issue but at the same time is functionally able to create a business model which has a better approach to VC than any other startup.

Question 3: Would VC and a lawyer have a leg up in a VC Role and how does someone with no work experience take up such a job?

Answer 3: It is definitely going to add more value to your work because you would be having an understanding of the regulations as well as it  will sort of work on your plus side while working in VC role because if you see the world the important businesses that got established were founded by lawyers even though they might not talk about it much but they did gain a wide variety of knowledge from it too.

Question 4: We see an increasing trend of lawyers pursuing CFA is it beneficial for PE and VC profile?

Answer 4: CFA is definitely beneficial if in case you are going to create a PE or VC profile it works as it helps to get your foot in the door type of a thing, in fact, it is a much cheaper alternative to an MBA.

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