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

“Kaun saala aisa bolta hai?” the advocate, who was frustrated with the opposing counsel’s strong arguments blurted out, while rummaging his papers. 

He then noticed that the court had fallen dead silent. Within a split second, he realised that the comment he had questioned had actually come from the judge. But he had gone through too extensive a training to go down in demanding situations like this. 

In the next split second, he picked up – “My Lord, let me humbly repeat my question – Kaun sa law aisa bolta hai?”

Jokes apart, when I was a kid, there is something my parents always used to hammer down on my head as being necessary. They called it ‘presence of mind’ – something people in today’s age refer to as ‘being present’ or ‘mindfulness’. It just refers to the state of being in the moment where you are right now, and nowhere else. It can be a lifesaver in courtroom situations.

In my teens and early youth, I was a complete brooder. 

I would never be where I was. I would be sitting in the living room and my brain would work fast forward to a few years later. 

I could visualise things that weren’t there vividly, in ridiculous details. Imagine what was the cost of that? I was not sparing much bandwidth for the work at hand, for what opportunities were in front of me.

I can still fall victim to thought attacks. But over the years, I have now trained my brain to brood only when I can afford to. 

For example, I would be brooding during my morning walk, and be fully present when I am cooking. 

I have written before about how visualisation also helps in bringing things from your imagination right down onto the Earth, in front of you. But today, I want to write about mindfulness, and that there is something called ‘legal mindfulness’.

I recall that in one of our classes, while dealing with an assignment about investment, all of us were discussing what approvals would be required by the target entity, which was a private company. 

The acquirer, in this case, was a public company. We were focusing on the nuances of investment alone, looking at the terms and looking at the exemptions available to the private companies. 

Click Above

This is when one of the students, who I may say was ‘legally mindful’ chirped in “But if this investment happens, the private company will become a subsidiary of a public company and therefore, a deemed public company, so it would not have the exemptions available.” 

We were so deep into the terms of investment that we missed upon this very basic tenet of company law – a subsidiary of a public company is a public company for all practical purposes. But this guy didn’t miss it (LawSikho students are simply amazing – you’ve got to be inside the classes if you want to experience this).

What makes you legally mindful? For starters, you must have the fundamentals deeply ingrained into you. 

While I was undergoing oral coaching for the CS course, one day, one of the professors asked us “Who is the king maker in a company?” 

“Whom will you consider the ultimate authority, in the operations of a company?” 

There were varied answers ranging from managing director, chairman, board of directors etc. Then the guy dropped the bomb. “Do you know that the chairman can be changed by the board and any of the directors can be removed by the shareholders? It’s the shareholders alone who are the king makers.” 

Given that we have seen lead investors capable of dragging the company down to sale if they want, it seems he was right. 

Even for listed entities where shareholders are scattered, we now have provisions for class action suits – it’s just a matter of time when these would start to gain traction. 

The point is that if you want to bring your brain fully to a legal analysis, your fundamentals should be very clear. This is why we are including content that discusses fundamentals in all of our courses, no matter how advanced they are meant to be. Before the chapters dealing with litigation, for example, we have decided we must have content covering the basics too.

Those who know the basics can skip, or better, revise from time to time. Fundamentals never go out of date. You cannot relearn them too many times.

The second and indispensable requirement for being legally mindful is training. 

How do you train your brain? 

Do you know what happens to an iron when you continuously rub it with a magnet? It becomes an artificial magnet. 

When you rub, rack, graze your brain against really smart heads, your brain becomes wired and starts functioning at far greater power. The more problems you have dealt with, the more problems you can deal with. Especially if you have been approaching these with collective intelligence. This is precisely why we have only problems being discussed in the classes and being attacked by a bunch of to-be superheroes.

The third requirement (or maybe this needs to be done even before the first two) is to free your brain from limiting beliefs. 

Often we are hopelessly restricted by limiting beliefs of not having time or not having money or simply not having the aptitude to engage in such insightful learning. 

We often encounter students overwhelmed with the amount of activities they have taken up. 

What’s going on all the time in their minds is “I have so much to do” and they are only looking at the pending amount of work. They are, thus, not able to be mindful and start to act and diminish the amount of pending tasks. 

When you start working on something, you realise that it isn’t such a big deal at all. All you need to do is to be present and work on the first available task at hand, right in that moment. You need to set priorities and work on things one at a time, one after another.

I have myself dealt with a limiting belief just a little more than a month back. 

I believed that if I was deep into one area of law, I couldn’t simultaneously deal with another. 

When I attacked this belief, I realised that it was possible to be interested in, and even go deep into two or three or as many areas of law as you felt like or which caught your fancy, all at the same time. You just have to drop the notion of a limit and circumstances and things miraculously change themselves to serve your purpose. 

So here’s an invitation to break your limits and bring your legal mindfulness into the classes of any of our following courses:

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 Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code

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

Certificate Course in National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) Litigation

Certificate Course in Arbitration: Strategy, Procedure and Drafting

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.