teams
NUJS Kolkata’s Vis teams for Vienna and Hong Kong finished finalists in the first Indian pre moot for the prestigious Willem C. Vis Arbitration moot, with the Vienna team defeating the Hong Kong team in the finals. Smaran Shetty, a member of the NUJS Vienna team won the best speaker award and Arya Trivedi from [[HNLU Raipur]] won the best external speaker (outside NUJS) award.
IDIA teams are free from bureaucratic controls and institutional requirements. It is a volunteer based movement which any socially motivated law student can initiate at his/her Law College. Here is a brief primer:
1. Read the concept note on IDIA (Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access to Legal Education) to get to know about IDIA in complete detail.
2. In your college inform as many people as you can. Tell your friends about it and get in touch with the Legal Aid Society and other related groups. Send the concept note to the group/batch email accounts. Get the support of the faculty too.
Please note that IDIA has no hierarchical organisation though team leaders are responsible for the allotted tasks.
After gathering considerable support of the students and faculty, talk to your Vice Chancellor/Director about IDIA and brainstorm how your law college can start similar initiatives in and around the area.
You can put a letter by the Vice Chancellor/Director on notice boards asking students to join the IDIA team.
3. Identify senior secondary schools (schools till class 12) situated in rural/economically backward areas in and around your college. See if you know some student/teacher from that school so that convincing the authorities becomes easier. You can also talk to the Principal of the school directly.
4. After discussing it with the school principal decide on some specific day when the IDIA team will visit the school for the talk/seminar and the aptitude test. Prepare well in advance. Talking about local legal personalities, stars go well with the students and so does the mention of placement figures etc.
5. Talk and test- Ideally you will need to reserve two classes (of 45 minutes each, approximately) for the two tasks. During the pre-decided day the first class is utilised for a small talk on CLAT, National Law Schools and Law as a career option. In the second class the aptitude test (which is available to the IDIA teams) is administered to the students.
6. Select- The students who score the highest in the aptitude test are selected after consultation with their teachers. The students selected should have a good chance of cracking CLAT on being provided with coaching.
The aptitude test’s marks are to be tabulated in an excel file.
Those students who are economically well off are not give free CLAT coaching but can surely keep in touch for guidance/mentoring etc. Economically poor students qualify for free CLAT coaching. Their full details should be kept for record.
7. Share- Students are encouraged to share their experiences on the school visits etc. Our blog www.idially.blogspot.com should provide you a ready reference on that.
8. Reach out- Visit as many schools as possible. Join the Facebook page, the blog, the group mails etc. For any clarification you can contact Prof. Shamnad Basheer of NUJS at shamnad[at]gmail[dot]com or Deepak Raju, a 5th year student at NUJS who is coordinating with the IDIA regional teams at deepakelanthoor[at]gmail[dot]com,
9. Funding and support- Try to get as many funds as possible. Travel, accommodation, printing costs etc. require money and socially committed lawyers, law firms, NGOs, philanthropists etc. should be willing to help you.
You can send the IDIA funding note to prospective donors.
IDIA has a tie-up with IMS for free CLAT coaching. If your area does not have an IMS center you will also need to involve a CLAT coaching institution to train the selected students.
There is a lot more that IDIA teams are doing. You will get to know about that with time when you become the part of the Google groups which have such great levels of activity that it has been difficult to keep with the inflow of emails! J
This is a reproduction of the post here. To keep in touch with what IDIA teams are doing please do follow our blog http://idially.blogspot.com/
Some lessons and insights for lawyers from cricket:
1.) Foreign players are popular
AMSS, the leading law firm in India recently hired Niloufer Lam, a Banking law specialist from UK; recruited an Irish lawyer Paku Khan; and had UK Chief Operating Officer (COO) in Valerie Bowles.
At the same time Amarchand's turnovers are hitting the roof. This obviously cannot be owed only to the foreign players but they surely seem to be 'liked' by the Indians.
If Amarchand has a UK COO for the internal managment, Paddy Upton from South Africa has worked with the India Cricket team as the mental conditioning coach. And then you have Gary Kirsten and Eric Simons as the head coach and the bowling coach respectively.
Venkatesh Prasad and Robin Singh, the Indian cricket team's young coaches were shown the door and the former Amarchand' COO Bithika Anand resigned.
So why this fascination for the foreigner*? A tentative answer is at the end of the post.
2. Bond Bhaiya! The whole thing is that ki bhaiya sabse bada rupaiya!
Bond. Shane Bond. The genuine quickie preferred to play for ICL to playing for his country. It is another thing that the flightless down-to-earth Kiwis (well they can't soar like the Eagles, roar like the Tigers or hop like the Kangaroos) welcomed him back to the team.
Ravindra Jadeja, the left arm spin bowling all-rounder thought that he had many other skills to his all-round abilities. This 'man in blue' was having a sprightly colourful life. Alas! He was left white faced after being caught red handed for doing blackish money things. (You won't get the joke if you are colour blind, or are dullness bound). J
While cricketers seem to prefer money over country, NLU grads prefer money over life. Tell me what specimen of a 24 year old gets kicks from drafting contracts and M&As working 14 hours a day?
3. Team Building
If you get great individuals on board with ordinary team spirit, they'll fail. Get ordinary individuals with great team spirit, they'll succeed.
I hope some of you remember the World Cricket Team (WCT) which played against the great Australian team. WCT had Sehwag, Kallis, Pollock, Murali, Flintoff etc. It played Aus on several occassions and lost very very badly.
Man to man the WCT was probably stronger. Aus won because it was a team and not a bunch of individuals. The Paras Kuhad-Hemant Sahai episode tells us the importance of that something which allows two groups to march together as one. Team Spirit is important "...to preserve the culture- that we have always lived by...", to succeed, to thrive.
See how a shared value system holds JSA (Jyoti Sagar Associates) together.
The tentative answer
*Maybe control from someone with different values, belief systems, language and management style is more effective. Or it could be that becoming a cricket coach or a law firm coach is still not a mainstream career option for the Indian students.
Because while every 15 year old kid in every gully and every 18 year old in every law school want to be a cricketer and a law firmite respectively; becoming a coach/consultant is still out of the radar.
Are Indians too mesmerised by talents and prodigies and learn only upto a certain, very young age and then stop the process? Afterall, being a coach means being a keen student for long. Really long.
I am no expert on this. What do you say?
PS- Here is the previous (and controversial) post on IPL, cricket and law.