LawSikho is India’s leading online education company that creates advanced and practical legal courses and customized training programs catering to lawyers, leading businesses and universities. 

We bridge the gap between theory and practice in legal education.

We bring industry insights into the domain of legal learning and make learning practical skills that help you to do client work simpler, quicker and cheaper.

Over the years, LawSikho has become a formidable eco-system which consist of: 

• Practical legal knowledge
• Repository of insights
• Video lessons
• Library of how-to guides and templates that can elevate a legal practice and help it scale faster 

LawSikho is also a community of lawyers who are forever a law student in their hearts and dedicate some of their time to studying and learning law, writing about it and even teaching it.

This community is also a force behind many projects like the iPleaders blog, which is one of the largest and most well-read legal blogs in the world, with around 1 crore individuals reading it annually, many events and webinars, as well as our fast-growing YouTube channel. 

There are projects like Project Access, through which we have been making the entire law school curriculum available on YouTube for free in the form of video lectures, and creating free to access reading the material as well.

 

Who takes our courses?

• Most of our students are lawyers with several years of experience who want to add new areas of law to their practice, or work on matters involving expertise in multiple areas at the same time  
• There are also many young law graduates who take our course in order to speed up their professional development and career progression
• There are some advanced law students who take our courses in order to procure practical knowledge beyond what is taught in law schools. It helps them to rapidly develop practical legal knowledge and skills, stand out from the crowd and perform better than expectations in internships and job interviews
• We offer test-prep courses for Bar exam, judiciary exam and CLAT. We intend to increase our footprint in this sector in the coming years 
• We have also catered to many non-lawyers who want to learn the law due to various professional benefits, from information security officers who want to learn technology law, procurement experts who want to learn more about contract law or HR managers who want to learn labor and employment laws or factory laws. We have catered to many government servants as well 
• About 5-10% of our students in any given month come from non-legal backgrounds. Some of our courses are in fact dedicated to such professionals
• We have worked with in-house legal departments, HR departments and various other divisions of very large corporations like ITC, ICICI Bank, Microsoft, Samsung, etc. to create and deliver customized online courses for their lawyers and other employees. For some of our blue-chip clients, we also offer physical workshops that rapidly train their employees in a specific area of law
• Universities engage us to train their teachers or to train their students in practical aspects in order to make them job-ready.  We have worked with a range of institutes like MNLU, Mumbai, NUJS Kolkata and KIIT Bhubaneshwar towards this. We offer a Virtual Campus Library to select universities and law schools for rapid practical training and internship preparedness of law students

 

How do our students benefit?

For ages, lawyers have learned practical legal knowledge through many years of apprenticeship. 

Law schools focus on a kind of liberal education, which focuses on critical thinking at best, and rote learning at its worst. However, one thing it certainly fails to do is prepare lawyers for practical tasks that they would have to undertake on behalf of their clients.

There was a time when clinical legal education was mooted as an idea in India and promoted by luminaries like late Prof. Madhav Menon, but it did not work, although National Law Universities were supposed to dispense clinical legal education. Still, at best, presently National Law Universities offer liberal education that arguably develops the thinking capacity of a law student, leaving them on their own when it comes to learning and performing practical legal work.

The training bottleneck faced by young law graduates trying to get a job, therefore, is incredible. They are exploited by lawyers who take them under their wing with a promise to teach them how to perform legal work and then can make them do all types of menial chores as well, without a specific focus on elevating their professional competence. 

Many young lawyers are reduced to being file bearers, clerical workers or even personal assistants of these senior lawyers for a meager payment that may often be less than the minimum wage levels of any state. We have written in detail about this problem over here. 

There is another dimension to the legal education crisis. The bigger problem is that India has absolutely no method for lawyers already practicing law to learn about new areas of law. Continuing legal education is non-existent in India, except for what we have to offer. Some courses are offered at times by some universities and BCI, but the less is said about those courses the better. A lot of lip service is given and a lot of money is made by certain organizations in the name of CLE in India, but forget quality even quantitatively these programs have impact tending to zero.

 

What do we do differently?

In this background, LawSikho is the only organization with a credible presence contributing to close to 2000 learners per year through a selection of over 30 practical courses that go into specific details of the frequently performed tasks in each practice area.

You may find it shocking that after 5 years of legal education, even the topper of a university or NLU for that matter is not taught how to draft various commercial agreements or a plaint or a bail application. They do not learn how to negotiate or review a legal document. They are promised that they will learn such skills from internships which rarely happens.

In contrast, in LawSikho, we teach 2 practical and marketable skills each week in our premium courses. The idea is that each skill should be valuable enough that the learner can charge at least INR 10,000 for doing that work. 

The process starts as follows: 

• The learner trying to solve two assignments, using our extensive library and study material. They are provided templates and how-to guides, using which they may draft or review the agreement, or prepare a negotiation strategy, draft an advisory note or memo, prepare applications of different types, or a plaint or a statement of defence
• Once every month, they also have to write an article that is of publishable quality and then publish the same
• When they submit this work to us, we review it and give them specific feedback in writing, through inline comments. For this, we have trained practicing lawyers as evaluators
• If learners do not submit assignments, our evaluators even follow up with them on the phone. We have success coaches who call and coach students who are struggling to learn something
• Trust me, this really stretches them. Even successful lawyers do not have a habit of regularly writing and publishing articles (although they may draft multiple contracts, opinions, and petitions everyday), so they are impressed when they see our alumni’s writing portfolio
• Finally, we have a live classroom session every week. Since people have already done some work on the subject matter of the class, and by now they have various opinions and ideas about how the work should be done, we have a very rich discussion under the guidance and mentorship of a very experienced teacher who is not an academic but a practitioner with substantial experience

Imagine you practicing singing, or boxing or just work out at the gym, regularly, for a year. How much will you change? If you had a well-developed system to nurture and guide you through the process of growth, how much you can progress in a year under the guidance of a capable and dedicated teacher?

That is exactly what happens to LawSikho students. They benefit from three things primarily: 

1. Regular practice of simulated legal work 
2. Regular feedback on their legal drafting and strategic inputs from experts in a safe and no-pressure environment (minus the scolding or judgment that one encounters at a real workplace)
3. Regular deep engagement with peers and senior lawyers in forms of debates and discussions

Apart from these curriculum-driven activities, they also benefit from a number of career focussed training sessions. Our students learn to work on a variety of skills, like: 

• How to prepare for interviews, 
• How to read faster, 
• How to develop your personal brand, 
• How to get better at time management, 
• How to become more effective through self-care rituals, 
• How to become effective at networking etc. 

There are multiple webinars every week and hundreds of recorded sessions that they benefit from.

They also publish their articles on iPleaders blog and other media portals where their work gets noticed. They benefit a lot from interacting with our large alumni base as well as their classmates. The networking opportunity is amazing as people refer work to each other and often get guidance from each other in various matters.

 

How we select our trainers

We do not bank exclusively on the ability of a star expert to design a course and deliver a handful of lectures. We do not give a broad mandate to an expert, such as to teach a course on ‘M&A’. 

That would disproportionately burden an expert to contribute on areas he or she may not have worked on. That may not enable the expert to contribute in the most meaningful way possible.

Instead, our team consults a larger pool of experts to identify the areas where cutting-edge work is happening and opportunities exist. Then they prepare a detailed curriculum. 

We have noticed that different experts have had practical experience and proficiency in specific parts of a subject. So, if you look at M&A, some lawyers would have done unlisted company acquisitions and business transfers for 7-8 years but not worked on listed company acquisitions under Takeover Code. Therefore, we identify experts who have worked on each kind of area.  

We also take care to speak to young, mid-level and senior practitioners, so that a broad range of challenges can be captured. 

We believe that learning is not a one-way transfer of knowledge from the expert to the student. Our learners stretch and expand their brains by application of knowledge to simulation exercises framed around real-life situations.

The quality of our programs is not measured by the stardom of the teacher, but the improvement in the capacity of the student.  

There are many more people involved in the creation and delivery of a single Lawsikho course than we know of in any conventional university. In a university, at least in India, the entire course creation process is left to one or a maximum of two teachers, who rely on textbooks to teach an entire course. Compared to that, a whole world of work by a team of 6-10 people goes into creating a single LawSikho course.

 

Over time, our methodology has evolved and gotten better. 

We are working on reducing many of the skills which a law firm partner or experienced litigator would say are developed ‘with experience’ or ‘vary based on commercials’, into an easily learnable skill that you can learn through practice over a few months. The results are so drastically different, that most lawyers find them hard to believe!

Our courses are always in a state of upgradation. In fact, the amount of time, effort and money we spend on upgrading existing courses, far exceeds what we first incurred on creating the first version of the course. And that is why our courses are always able to keep pace with a fast-changing legal industry.

Experts find joy in working with us because their intention to impart practical skills materializes in a very unique way. They are able to limit their time to do what they do best. Some experts may find it worthwhile to contribute to exercises, while others may prefer to take online classes. Still, others might be willing to contribute some templates or write a few chapters. 

This flexibility enables us to create courses that are extremely rich in their scope. 

Our mission has not been fulfilled merely by launching 30 or more breakthrough courses, which is the situation today. We know that we are on the correct path, but we are improving constantly and not resting. And that is why our students do not hesitate to pay us premium prices for programs like Master Access or Corporate Law Library.

LawSikho is a unique organization with a very unique learner profile. We are often approached by recruiters and law firms to recommend capable lawyers with the right skills to them. This puts us in a great position to share exclusive job opportunities and openings with the learners. We even recommend those who perform well in class for jobs and internships on a regular basis. However, we give no guarantee to anyone for placements or jobs.

Nonetheless, we can assure you that if you properly follow our premium courses, you will tremendously benefit and getting a job or finding your own clients would not prove to be a particularly hard task provided that you go through the training program with diligence and motivation.