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Law happens in courts and not in colleges.
If you paid attention in Uni, you will be able to
recall the concepts with one reading. Or else, start all over again. Study the subject again. Depending on its importance.
Forget graduating, I would sometimes forget things after the semester finished. I’ve no idea how I got through most of my university life with good scores because I have no recollection of contract law, constitution, criminal law or anything I studied bar Company Law - which I was slightly better at recalling than other subjects.
This isn’t something to gloat about because it quickly caught me off guard in my first year of work. In all honesty, a mixture of COVID, heavy transactional work, busy seniors - really did not help me when I was an A0. In fact, if I met myself back in 2020 as a first year lawyer, I would say that I should have been sacked for how bad I was. In my first year, my biggest priority was that I focus on the small aspects of a transaction I was given and not think about anything else - which is not right.
But I recovered but lot more to go. As an answer below tells you, specialising is key. This may seem like a vague statement but it actually made a huge difference for me. I had applied for an LLM after my first year at the job and I got a good US school, and when I was doing the online “meet and greet” with other potential batchmates, it scared me just how senior and just how much the others knew so I deferred my admission to get back to basics.
The first thing I did was find out something I really liked and then find the corporate angle to it. Football and IPL was a natural fit for me so I found genuine interest in studying about what an “LBO” is and why it is not allowed in India (how Manchester United were bought). Progressively that moved onto other sectors I liked like Media, FnB and then FinTech. The idea was to truly find my work immersive by understanding who the buyer and who the Target was. Books and YouTube were most helpful. I would google a lot of words while watching Shark Tank US, which I did not understand.
This helped me a lot when it came to doing DD - as it told me the full story of a company across various aspects.
Then it was about bothering seniors, and a lot of YouTube. Nobody explains to us in University why Indian SPAs have “Warranty and Representations” treated exactly the same - when in fact, they are separate concepts. Nobody ever tells you why a breach of warranty should be backed indemnity and not damages. The idea of “specific performance” does not suddenly appear in your head. Equally, nobody had ever taught me the boiler plate clauses in detail. Nobody teaches you why de-minimis and basket are 0.1 and 1 and why these change for auctions. Nobody teaches you where the concept of specific indemnity came from. So I went and studied these in detail - not from books, but from my firm’s material and YouTube.
After that, it was entirely about ensuring that I find a way to get on calls with my seniors - who after a while, relented and did allow me to sit on negotiations with my mouth shut and to take notes. This was life changing and now that I’m fairly mid level, I enjoy looking at all possible positions and their rationale - without saying “this is not market”. This was 2023.
In 2024, I was seriously caught out on some very niche aspects of shares on a slightly complicated transaction which neither my partner nor I had ever seen - my partner found a solution and I did not, which truly got me interested in instruments. So a lot of my time this year has been learning about shares and all sorts of instruments. I wish I had done these in detail before.
My current goal is to learn more of the math for example, closing accounts where a transaction is cash-free, debt free. Conversion of shares, anti-dilution, vesting of shares - as I’m progressively doing some VC work.
Even after all of this, I will often get stumped on some really basic thing that I should know, but I don’t. This disheartens me at times, but I accept that my skill is that I have energy to learn on my own time.
Obviously none of this is possible without great seniors and mentors - I have generally had exceptionally patient seniors who had a lot of time for my horrible mistakes. Of course, this is just product and law - I’m slowly starting to realise just how much more there is to corporate profession in terms of soft skills and downward/ upward managing.
My suggestion is to (somehow) try and find an enjoyment in the core work that you do. In all honesty, that’s what has kept me going without feeling like I’m burning out.