Thanks to a dear reader, who has pointed out some interesting titbits in a recent online video interview of NLSIU Bangalore vice-chancellor (VC) Prof Sudhir Krishnaswamy, talking (a little bit) about the recent blockbuster faculty recruitments, a criticism of wider Indian legal academia and plans for NLS to become a pioneer in online legal education.
The interview, which was held on Sunday and is available on YouTube (see below), was hosted by legal event management company Idex Legal and legal market consultancy The Grey Matter.
We have (roughly) transcribed some of those passages below since some of them may be of wider reader interest.
NLS faculty recruitments
At around 24 minutes, Krishnaswamy confirmed that NLSIU had made nine offers to faculty, as we had reported last week.
However, the university has so far declined to confirm those offers or names.
In respect of those names, he talked about the value of recruiting young academics, and urged other law schools to do that too over the next five years.
I mean, since I’m a young person as a VC, I shouldn’t be the one giving advice but here’s my take.
I’ll just tell you what I’m doing and maybe some of this is worth trying to emulate.
I think the key is to make a bet on young people and think about institutional pathways looking 10, 20 years out.
So we have gone through, in the last seven, eight months, a robust round of recruitment and I am very proud of the nine people we made offers to and all of them are very good and accomplished in their fields, very well educated.
... I must say I found support of my stakeholders to do this, is to make sure that every one of them has come in on a solid contract and also paid well, paid well relative to the public scales and today under the seventh Pay Commission scales.
It’s not bad at all - it’s not what it was in 2000 - and so my sense is that I think that all institutions have got to make this kind of a wager right.
We’ve got to make a bet on young talented people who are who are self-motivated in academia for the right reasons, but who simply have delivered and have accomplished something and one doesn’t it doesn’t really matter where they come from beyond that you know as long as they’ve got they’ve got good educational background, they read and write well, they’re interested and motivated into teaching.
We should bet on these these young people and so that’s what I’m trying to do and I suppose if institutions across India did that for the next five years, Indian legal education will take a very sharp up turn
Online education
At around 34 minutes, in response to a question about making “workforce-ready lawyers”, the VC went into some detail about his plans for online education, which seem to form a core part of NLS future strategy (though clearly all these plans are only on the drawing board so far).
That said, some of them might not require regulatory approval, he said, and the administration was working on the plans “intensely”, possibly even to be launched by 2021.
It should be noted that NLS wouldn’t be the first NLU to aim to offer online legal education to the masses: several other national law schools are offering distance education and other online courses, though usually via private service providers.
We have not been able to confirm whether NLS hopes to homebrew its online legal education programme or to work with the private sector.
If the former, it will be quite ambitious getting it right.
If the latter, the question would be how it will look different from what others have done before and are currently doing (though the NLS brand name would certainly help in marketing it).
Krishnaswamy said:
There are two ways this can happen. This can happen by all of the law colleges upgrading, and you knobw, just running a better better classroom learning experience.
Another would be that - and this is something that at NLS we are working quite hard at and have not made any public announcement about - is to take the online education part very seriously.
So, I think that one one important way for us to meet our mission in the National Law School set up, is to be a pioneer in public legal education and and to respond to that mission and scale.
I mean we run hyper selective programs, so very few people are going to get into these programs even if we expand these programs.
But maybe the way we can do that scale is to offer online education or hybrid education in more, stronger ways and this is something we’re working at intensely at the moment and hopefully even in the year 2021 we’ll see some of those results.
But I would say, in the medium term, we should have a relatively large offering on online education.
I think that part of online / hybrid education will take care of some part of this.
If we don’t do it like that, we’ll have to do it by all of these law schools really reforming themselves and ... making a more sophisticated offering, and the kind of institutional incentive game that needs to be resolved by the time say 30-40 percent of the law schools reform the way we work, is quite daunting even to imagine and conceptualize.
... So today let’s say that our young law graduate in some part of rural Uttar Pradesh who wants to to know what it means to to effectively draft a non-disclosure agreement.
Where would they go to learn this? Obviously, they could have learnt it in their law school maybe their law school has taught them this, maybe it hasn’t.
What if we were able to offer them at relatively low prices online, and I’m really saying - I don’t want to talk numbers - but I talk about relatively low prices. Simple modules, where people can work with documents, learn what these documents mean, actually practice drafting them in real time and, you know, improve careers.
Now we don’t have a continuing legal education credit system yet mandated in the legal profession, but I think these kinds of learning opportunities are learning opportunities that will pay themselves in the market. We don’t need regulatory permission we we probably will just get market recognition for doing these programs.
So the way I’m thinking about this challenge is that we respond to people who are already graduates of law and give them the opportunity to self learn along pathways that they create for themselves just responsive to where they are and maybe if they don’t need non-disclosure agreements maybe they need you know agricultural warehousing agreements and if we can ... work through what those kinds of pledge and collateral arrangements might be we would will be doing a huge service.
We can’t do this through an on-campus a program - like on-campus programs will always be limited in scale of these - but my sense is the the serious intervention the national law school can meet in professional learning is this way.
Rajiv Luthra makes guest appearance, VC hopes to work more closely with firms
Making a guest appearance, L&L Partners managing partner Rajiv Luthra asked an audience questions at around the 1 hour 35 mark about technology and law, prompting Krishnaswamy to note that NLSIU was “in the early stages” of setting up a new law and technology centre, dealing with cutting-edge issues such as 3D printing, the Internet of Things.
Luthra then added: “My firm normally gets about 40 to 50 students every year and there’s a lot of retraining we have to do, let me tell you that. But some basic, fundamental things, which I don’t see any law colleges, including the better ones like the school that you belong to, teach [is] things like emotional intelligence, things like stress management.
“You know these [are] a reality once you come out of law school, this is something you’re suddenly faced with and you don’t know what to do with it, so maybe we could think of some curricula which could help students hit the road running as it were.”
Krishnaswamy noted that the university was instituting “wellness programmes” to prepare students to deal with stress at college.
He also said that he was “very keen” to engage with law firms and would “offline reach out to you directly”
“I‘d be more than happy to help,” said Luthra.
Feudal academia
Going into more historical (and less newsy territory about what’s up at NLS), at around the 15 minute mark, Krishnaswamy talked about how academics in India are / were often “feudal” and often discouraged young faculty from succeeding:
I think that most universities and universities ... they [operate as] a sort of Society of Fellows way, they’re all peers, they don’t report each other in any formal sense.
Having said that, people have spent longer years and shorter years in the profession, so there are sort of natural professional hierarchies that might develop.
But the situation in India was quite different initially because far from professional and, you know, seniority-type hierarchy, hierarchies were deeply feudal structures.
Right, the universities in India are driven by very strong arrangements around teaching faculty so while in an ideal sense we should have flat fellowships of faculty, in a practical sense we have a quite sharp-edged feudal hierarchies of of, you know, both of honour and status and respect, that young people are expected to kowtow to in the early part of their careers and later too.
But so the Indian system, you know, it doesn’t help that we don’t have the institutional structures that pour a lot of resources and money behind the profession of teaching and then maybe have these kinds of your barriers in some sense.
Neither of this - it’s not a good cocktail and we would do well to illuminate both and put in better salaries and more nurturing environments at the same time and part of my interest in what I do is to try and do that
His early days returning to NLS
Around the 20 min 45 second mark, Krishnaswamy said that he didn’t have the best experience when he had returned to NLSIU as a lecturer, following his Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University:
I had no red carpet rolled out for me at the national law school. You might think and you mentioned the Rhodes Scholarship and Oxford and all the bells and whistles, and you might imagine that, you know, NLS would be very hospitable and what I can tell you is that at that point in time these were not the priorities for the institution, this is not what they were looking for.
And so getting into the formal public legal education system is not easy for starters, so once you get in, you’ve got to stay the path right and I suppose that, so let me put it like this, so I got in in with a very minor contract when I started off in NLS, not something that most peers would have even accepted.
I stayed it, I stayed through.
It was not like I had some elevator path, it’s not like because I did my job well or sincerely or whatever else, that somehow I got an accelerated path. That’s not the way legal education is structured right, so every part of the way was a certain small incremental progress.
And so I feel that the challenges that most people would face in the public system is that you have to find a way that that you can sustain yourself through this rather longish period.
And for that, I mean, it can’t be, I don’t think, that money can be the driver because I think one sort of makes up one’s mind that you’re not, you know, going to be, say, a top ten percentile, or know that that might be okay but you’ve got to get the rest of it to work for you: the teaching and the learning, the reading and the writing, publishing.
Maybe non-monetary recognitions of various sorts?
And we need to do better like that in legal education in India, but any young person thinking along these lines has got to brace for a good period of time where at least to the external world not much is happening
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It reminded me of a story that you had done earlier www.legallyindia.com/lawschools/after-rmlnlu-death-allahabad-hc-condemns-admin-for-never-ending-trial-of-late-student-20121221-3335
What happened to the CBI inquiry then? Was the compensation paid to the family of the deceased student? Balraj is now sitting pretty as VC, NLU Jabalpur and his friend RS got him on this MHA committee www.barandbench.com/news/mha-constituted-criminal-law-reforms-committee-urged-to-disclose-terms-of-reference which is likely to rubber stamp greater invasive powers for the state and dilute evidence requirements in the name of victims' rights, national security etc. Like the Justice Malimath Comm.
It's just not about "stress" at NLUs or "snowflakes" who cannot "handle pressure". We need greater focus on individual and collective actions of the powers that be in NLUs that often push "snowflakes" into committing suicide and how things are hushed up thereafter.
Can/will you do story on this?
And no other tier-1 firm has such a terrible HR or a feedback process. Its just easier for the kids to leave and find a new job than deal with the BS of emotionally stunted partners. And last but not the least everyone in the market knows why most female hires prefer to opt for your Mumbai office nstead of Delhi.
When he talks about training, can someone ask him when was the last time he opened a bare act, or lead a transaction, or wrote an article, [...] other than the gupp sessions in his office room, with free flowing booze till 2 am.
Emotional intelligence?!? Really ?!? Ppl who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones at others. I can name soo many partners and Managing Associates who left the firm because of his rude comments, hypocrisy, ego, and sexism.
www.barandbench.com/news/mha-constituted-criminal-law-reforms-committee-urged-to-disclose-terms-of-reference
MS is supposed to be a bleeding heart liberal, gender rights sensitive etc. Not like RS/Tau. Of course what can MS do if he is being invited by Tau or the Big Tau from Lion State to be a committee member. An offer was made that cannot be refused! I guess ambition can and does make us do things. And the silence on the labour issue at NLUD? Simply golden.
Oh SK's wife is a signatory images.assettype.com/barandbench/2020-07/2ca4adb8-5bd3-4d0f-b905-4ccbbb121a20/Response_Reforms_Committee.pdf
But SK needs to maintain golden silence too. Else the "struggle and hard work" since 2000 will go poof!
RS, Bajpai, Chauhan, Mahesh Jetmalani and Thareja.
Kian, as a PSA you should put in a reference juxtaposing his comments in this clip against news that L&L just took money away from its people retrospectively.
1. Sudhir
2. Faizan
3. Ranbir
2. V. Vijayakumar
3. Vivekanandan
4. Mridula Mishra, Patna
As for practicing lawyers who may want to join universities full time the reality is that their careers dont leave them with the time to prepare for a rote learning exam like the UGCNET and let's face it that exam is simply not designed for this target group. I doubt even senior partners at law firms will be able to clear what is probably India's most antiquated and illogical "qualification" exam. Apart from this there is also the institutional rivalry they face from the entrenched lifers. In the last 20 years how many lawyers have actually taken the plunge? Maybe 1 or 2. The whole system is designed to repulse lawyers from entering mainstream teaching other than some guest faculty roles.
On both these counts Sudhir has done squat. As the beneficiary of significant amount of rules-deviation himself I'm surprised he's chosen to follow the same old system and I doubt he'll be sticking his neck out to fast track anyone the way MP Singh did for him.
The rest of your post is just a [...] response to some harsh words I said. I stand by what I said earlier about most faculty at the NLUs with mediocre (actually below average) academic records, woefully inadequate knowledge and shabby attitude. They're not there out of a love for teaching or research, they're there because they dont get placed, have no options and getting enrolled into the LLM/MPHI/PHD degrees gives them something better [...]. If they play their cards right (and most do) they figure out how to get a permanent job and then it's a free lunch for the rest of their lives slapping around students (often literally), missing classes, leaking question papers, making passes at students and teaching nonsense.
Let me assure you I am quite familiar with the composition and people who comprise the NLU faculty (at least at NALSAR, NUJS and NLUJ). I have often visited for recruitment and am often requested to give a few lectures at these places. In the course of doing so I have met or chatted with most of the faculty and am familiar first-hand with their intellect and attitude (or lack thereof). I personally would not consider most of them fit to be appointed as a court clerk in my office. Having said that there is a very small minority who are exceptional (couple of guys in NALSAR, one in NUJS (also has a NALSAR connection), three people in NLUJ) but they are very much the exception.
Take it easy [...]
My take is that this exam serves no real utility other than a nice barrier for high-performer alumni / lawyers to migrate to teaching. I am quite well aware of this "exam" and the rubbish one needs to memorize to get through. More than a few who have cleared it have narrated how unpredictable it is, how utterly irrelevant the content is and how much a role luck and chance play on exam day - the once a year when it is held. It's continuation is mind-boggling considering there is no such requirement for recruitment at the IITs, the IIMs or AIIMS (comparable institutions of professional qualifications). The result is quite obvious. At one level this protects the jobs and skins of the mediocre (that's putting it kindly) faculty at the NLUs whether old or young whether NLU alumni or not. Most of them would be out on the street if they faced competition from both the high performer alumni (with LLMs) or those from the profession. At another level this fills up the law schools with these parasites most of whom frankly don't have any idea of the subjects they teach, are hopeless outdated and behavior-wise are appalling.
Ironically the biggest losers are not the high performers or the industry experts who frankly have no route to get a permanent job in these NLUs (they're all doing great). It's the students and the reputation of these NLUs that suffer. Consider this - Cyril Shroff, Zia Mody, Subhankar Dam, Lawrence Tribe, Akhil Amar , none of these people would qualify for a lowly assistant professor position at even a Tier 2 law school like NLUJ or NUJS (let alone NLS or NALSAR). Do you think such a system makes sense? And if you think finding a way to get such people on board is "gaming the system" [...]
Then what explains the reason why there are no lawyers from the profession who are NET qualified and join NLUs for a happily-ever-after OR none of the high performers (Balganesh et al). Even the few exceptions among Indian NLU faculty like Sudhir, Mrinal and Lawrence Liang never bothered to do NET and instead qualified the PhD route (Shamnad was not even a PhD). By your logic surely the NET is easier than 5 years of doing a PhD? (Trivia: Shamnad (at the time of his death) was also neither PhD nor NET qualified. So even he didn't / couldn't clear NET and would be unable to join at a tenured position)
I stand by what I said. The NET is an archaic, irrelevant and useless qualification that has served to encourage the bottom-rankers, the very worst alumni (TLCs or NLUs) into settling down in these NLUs as faculty. They are further sheltered from competition by this NET and if it were to be removed tomorrow, 90% of them would be kicked our or shamed into resigning by the students once more motivated people join.
Your pitiful defense of NET is quite similar to way the mediocre advocates at the bar resisted for decades the AIJS knowing all too well that once that materialized the best talent would simply join through AIJS and their prospects for elevation to the high courts would become nil.
Your level of comprehension is so low that you found the comments above to be in support of NET! I think you should get back to law school and start paying attention to classes. You clearly didn't the first time around.
Those who do good in the entrance exam will go to NLSIU and those, unfortunately, do not do that well on that day; may join JGLS. Now, what will these rankings do to anyone?
Separately, what is this Sudhir, Ranbeer, Faizan, Mridula fuss all about? I do not think any other discipline has such a website or discussion forum where people fight on rankings and discuss faculty or retainer moves. Philip Kotler is a marketing guru but I do not see any Bschool arguing about his moves or anyone else's. At the end of the day, it is what you learn and not who teaches you. Of course, a good mentor is needed but just having a good mentor will not make you a good lawyer. It is one's self learning and then the practicalities in the profession.
Rajiv Luthra points out an important fact: 'retraining'. Care to think about that, please?
Grow up, guys.
I know there are reports of bad behaviour from his time at NUJS, but from what I saw when he taught me- he was committed to teaching and improving educational institutions- he worked hard to design his classes thoughtfully and keep track of how his students were progressing and making sure he was setting them up to succeed and continuing to mentor them long after they graduate. Again - he’s not perfect- but he definitely does care about student centred teaching. I honestly think that we are so used to being left to our own devices that we can’t make sense of someone who is invested in our education sometimes- and perhaps it’s time we asked more of ourselves as well as our teachers.
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