This article is written by Abhyuday Aggrawal, COO at LawSikho.
A senior associate was speaking on the VSAT on a recent M&A transaction and the Takeover Code. Lawyers from 3 cities were hooked onto the screen, eager to learn. Zia Mody asked a few questions. She was called Zia by everyone in office, even interns, as the culture there was to call everyone by first name. All the partners participated and suggested alternatives. It was an animated discussion, very much like an active game of chess. Associates listened keenly.
I was pursuing my 4th year corporate law firm internship, and for me, this was a radical contrast to the abstract and conceptual experience of corporate law.
This was AZB’s periodic knowledge sharing meeting, held approximately every fortnight, from what I remember. Everyone had to participate, even the senior-most partners. Zia Mody herself took keen interest in the meeting and participated.
I learnt one thing from the knowledge-sharing sessions – it was only about the deal (or transaction). My ‘bare act’ and ‘case law’ friendly mind had to be re-wired. My thoughts had to originate from a different place. From then on, my mind started getting tuned to looking for how to provide solutions to clients.
As I have been working on legal education for the past six years to create courses, I took up a simple approach – the business approach.
When I speak to people or read a statutory provision or a case, I keep finding problems. When I read a statute, what goes on in the back of the mind is the problems that the statute is trying to address, and problems that it is not addressing. When I read a case, I think of the commercial situation that must have played out. While preparing for an IP law class, I came across the Mattel case and the Oxford University Press case, instead of merely learning about the ‘ratio’, that is, the rationale behind the court’s decision, I was asking the following questions:
How can a university enable the highest quality of learning to be available to its students without paying a high cost for purchasing multiple copies of expensive foreign treatises and books?
How can a game or toy manufacturer, e.g. Funskool or an app developer use this to protect his IP?
Similarly, when I recently learnt about a Bombay High Court judgment on third-party rights, before jumping to the analysis of the doctrine, I first looked at which commercial situations in real life could actually impact third parties in this manner?
As a law student, I would have thought of this as a conceptual proposition about third party rights and the law of arbitration. Many lawyers think like this, and their responsibility to publish or share knowledge is limited to sharing the ‘ratio’ of the latest case, or analyzing the differences in the law laid down by different judgments, without appreciating whether and how it impacts clients directly.
The former approach makes your takeaways long-lasting – you may read something once, but the learnings can be applied in multiple scenarios which are faced by others.
As a result, almost anyone who has completed Class XII can pick up and learn from (it is not simple because I can run the risk of making a course too basic or exclude people from learning).
This really is the secret sauce to why the content in our courses is so different, and it all started back then, 10 years back, when I interned in AZB. I literally got a good look into the mind of a managing partner in the country’s top law firm.
I realized how valuable this perspective is later on, when in some meetings (events such as Legally Social, etc.) I heard that when clients talk to managing partners of India’s best law firms, the conversation is purely around business, and very little is said about the law.
I realized a few days back that we are not trained to think like this, even after we start working in law firms. I take inputs from a lot of practitioners to create practical courses, and they enjoy working with us, as it is challenging and they an the opportunity to use their legal brain in a different way.
This methodology is not ingrained into our legal education system, but this is what business lawyers do day in and day out. I know many associates who despite working for a couple of years are unable to pick up the intent of the clients in this way. Many lawyers leave it to clients or the commercials of the deal, as though their only job is to put copy paste the commercials into a standard contract. Hence, their learning is slowed down. The danger they face is that they may not mature into versatile lawyers, even as they gain years of experience. They can be phased out relatively easily.
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