While Stepping into a Law School… Part II

What are the skills required to a lawyer? From whatever little I have seen of the profession, I can divide the skills into 3 different types of skills-Skills that can be developed while at the law school, personality traits or office skills and court room skills.

Law School Skills

I have just spoken of the number of laws and how it is impossible to know them and how lawyers are required to know ‘where’ to find the law and ‘what to make’ of it above. This is a primary skill officially called ‘Research’ and ‘Analysis’.

Learning ‘Research’ is fairly easy. All you have to know is how to use several databases to extract information relevant to your cause. It includes books, internet, computer based databases, Law Journals and sometimes, when you are looking for a little expert information, the databases relating to such information. For example, if you are working on a case involving, let us say, surrogacy, you need to know the medical aspects of surrogacy as well.

Learning ‘Analysis’ is a life long process. Honestly, most educated minds are doing analysis at a subconscious level all the time. For example, when you decide to buy a certain model of a scooter averaging 50 kpl for 50,000 rupees over a cheaper model costing 35,000 rupees but averaging only 40kpl, you have processed the information to reach a conclusion that spending more right now makes more sense because by buying a scooter that mileages more, you are actually saving more money in the long run. Here, the prices and the mileages of the scooters are mere information. Your conclusion is your analysis.

Again, this fact situation is fairly simple involving mere facts. When you have to process facts along with several esoteric rules to reach a conclusion, the process becomes fairly difficult. Most judgments are conclusions reached after taking into consideration these facts along with the esoteric rules. That is why I strongly recommend reading real texts of judgments and the text books written using the Case Book Method.

It is needless to mention that it is this skill that will help you all your life in no matter what you decide to do after taking your law degree. You need to analyze while making every important conscious decision of your life.

Office Skills

Though I have labeled these as office skills, I do strongly think, that one may begin to develop them while at the law school itself. When you start working, you need only to sharpen them.

‘Trust’

Let us say you are suffering from a serious ailment which requires going under the scalpel. The operation is likely even to cause your death if anything goes wrong. Would you entrust your life into the hands of someone who passed out from a Medical School yesterday? Unless, you are insane, your answer will be a firm and a certain no. But you certainly will entrust it into the hands of someone who has done several such operations, won’t you?

The business of a lawyer is very similar to that of a doctor. It is serious. You’re dealing with the lives and hard earned money of other people. It is very necessary therefore to ‘win the their trust’. The way you talk to people, the way you interact with them, you should seem authoritative, yet friendly and approachable. You should look like and be someone people around you like will trust for your word.

Developing this persona is a skill. Everyone ends up finding different ways to develop it. I suggest talking to diverse groups of people on any subject under the sun. I say ‘any subject under the sun’ because it brings in a sort of humility in a person- because then you know, you don’t know much and yet while you remain confident of your ability to express your thoughts, you end up having ‘respect’ for thoughts you disagree with and subjects you know nothing of. You may also end up knowing a lot about things you know nothing of. This was the sort of exposure LST was able to give me. What you should be happy about is that most law schools are filled with diverse people from all over India and doing this is fairly easy.

While Stepping into a Law School… Part I

The other day a friend suggested why I don’t write about my experiences at the law school now that I am almost a lawyer. I don’t know how much I know because I have seen people who know much, much more. The way I see it, I’m absolutely incompetent for the task. But on second thoughts, when I compare myself to what I knew as a person interested in law and as person who possesses a law degree, I do know of certain insights in the profession which I may share with everyone interested.

First myth is that ‘lawyers know the law’. Let us just do some Math. There are over 33, 00, 000 statutes in India, add to these the innumerable customs and traditions of different places applicable as law to those places, the multitude General Resolutions of the Government, the various Notifications, the rules under all these enactments plus the judgments passed every day by courts all over the world from all common law countries and treaties and conventions the nations have entered into etc. In short, it is impossible for anyone to know the law. No lawyer ‘knows’ the law.

What do lawyers do then? They are simply required to know how to ‘find’ the law applicable and then when all applicable laws are found and understood, making out what do ‘they mean’. The task is not as simple as it sounds because most of the times more than one law are applicable to a particular fact situation. They are often vague, ambiguous, contradictory, written in a language difficult to understand etc. While advising a client you have to take into consideration the ‘combined effect’ of all these laws put together along with the ‘client specific’ or the ‘case specific’ concerns. Point being becoming lawyer is not rote learning, it is learning a thought a process- learning ‘how to think.’

How does one learn this thought process? I did not go to a premiere law school. I do not know what are the methods used by the professors or teachers there to imbibe these skills in their students. Personally however, I would strongly recommend reading real texts of as many judgments as possible. I would strongly recommend reading textbooks written using the Case-Book Method and books of Lord Denning. Over a period of time, you will realize that ‘law’ is not an abstract concept which can stand independently on its own. It is a philosophy developed over ages which, just like poems, means different things to different people at different times. Just that laws, unlike poems, do not always rhyme.

To give an example of what I mean let us take the case of two baby siblings who want to share equally one bar of chocolate someone has given them. It is most likely that they will take the bar to their mother and trust her to break it into two equal pieces for them. The mother will then break the bar into two pieces and hand them a piece each.

Here, in spite of the fact that neither the siblings, nor the mother know a zilch about law the facts to be noted from a lawyer’s perspective are the sense the siblings have that ‘justice needs to be done’, that ‘it has to be done by someone impartial’ and finally the fact that ‘mother does justice.’  Point simply being, that no matter what we all do, we all have an inherent notion of what is ‘just’ and ‘fair’ irrespective of whether we know the law.

The fact situation I have created above is fairly simple. In real life, the situations are much more complicated and stakes much higher than a chocolate bar.

 The study of ‘law’ therefore is both, the study of this ‘notion’ and an ‘activity’ which will enable us to develop over time our own ‘notion’ suitable to the needs of the present society. The more you study, the more you develop your ‘notion’ and that is precisely why older lawyers charge much, much more than younger lawyers.