India has the largest legal profession in the world (1.3 million attorneys). The corporate legal market in India is worth a billion dollars, half of which is shared by foreign law firms. The top 100 Indian companies spent approximately 600 million dollars last year as legal fees. Our legal market is growing very fast and we urgently need competent law graduates. The establishment of national law universities in India has changed the face of legal education in the country.
These universities attract the best brains of the country. We have few islands of excellence. The students of these law schools have done exceedingly well in the international moot court competitions which shows legal education in India is reaching a golden age. Law has again become the most sought after course.
What should one really expect from a legal professional in today's globalized world? It is generally said that today’s law student should have at least the following skills: ability of intensive research; analytical ability; ability of client counselling; advocacy skill; documentation and conveyancing skill; negotiation skill; court craftsmanship, and procedural skill and a skill for human relations.
We need to integrate these skills into our legal education. Our students must possess wide range of "competencies" beyond a simple mastery of law and legal doctrines. Are our Law Schools, particularly the Law Departments of traditional universities and the 950 law colleges of the country, successful in imparting these desired skills in their students is the greatest challenge? Few so-called national law schools or islands of excellence cannot bring about a radical change and therefore we need to improve our law colleges.
Our teaching methods have to change to adjust to the new and fast-changing world, otherwise our students will never acquire muchneeded skills. Many a time, learning is a very boring experience at law schools. We must incorporate humor to make the learning exercise more fun and thereby trick the students into learning more. Use of software applications, late evening classes, innovative credit system, offering of courses in music, painting, biotechnology, foreign languages, sports etc. will not only lead to true integration of knowledge but also help in retaining interest of highly talented students.
Just as businesses and law firms can no longer take a strictly local or even regional perspective in terms of competition, neither can law schools. The legal education of today requires emphasis on trans-national fields, such as public international law, regional law, international trade and finance, environmental and climate change law, new transnational fields such as Internet law, procurement, and transitional justice, international criminal law and law and development are to be included.
We also need to create a proper and authentic rating system for law schools and bring in accreditation standards comparable to United States, bring changes in financing of legal education as the cost of legal education in the elite national law schools is very high, take immediate measures to attract and retain talented faculty and offer them salary and perks at par with IITs, invest in curriculum development to make it comparable with the leading law schools of the West, bring changes in the examination system to test knowledge rather than memory, and we must take steps to enhance research at law schools as most of the law schools continue to be UG centric.
Finally, legal education should now become "justice education" and while to meet the challenges of market and new world order, the focus today is more to the corporate sector, our law schools should not be completely hijacked by the corporates. We have a duty to produce good and competent trial lawyers, social litigation advocates and properly trained judges.
The creation of new breed of lawyer depends itself on the creation of a new teacher. All curricular revision ought to be guided by one basic criterion viz. whether current doctrine and practice in particular areas of law serve to promote basic democratic values and
needs of time.
An additional focus of our strategy should be to make our programs more attractive to foreign students to meet and increase the demand for a globalized Law education. We must start general nine-months specialized LL.M. programs. To meet the market demand and to differentiate our offerings from those of other top law schools, we should also develop an Executive LL.M. Program for students who wish to seek an Anglo-American training in law and business while continuing their work commitments as seniors or executives in their firms and companies.
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