"Law Schools Must Prepare Students For Diverse Career Paths”: Dr. Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Law, NLSIU

Could you share your remarkable journey in academia that began as a student at NLSIU?

I joined the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) in 1993. At that point, I was unsure of my chosen career but enjoyed the five years of the integrated BA LLB programme at the law school. When I graduated in 1998 as the sixth batch of the University, and had the opportunity to read at the Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, the Rhodes Scholarship opportunity allowed me to pursue a 2-year Bachelor of Civil Laws degree, which gave me an immersion into the highest level of academic and philosophical enquiry into law. This experience motivated me to explore an academic career by returning to NLS as a young faculty member in 2000. Over the next three years, I taught several courses at NLS and was reasonably confident that through that rigorous effort, I had developed the basic skills and temperament to be a good law teacher. I returned to Oxford in 2003 to pursue a DPhil in law, and completed that degree in due course. After teaching at Oxford for a short while, I returned to NLSIU as a faculty member in 2006. After my PhD, I have stayed with academic research, teaching, and policy interventions for nearly two decades.

In your opinion, what is the primary goal of a law school?

Indian law schools offer two kinds of law degrees, an undergraduate 5-year law degree and a graduate 3-year law degree. A legal education is above all, a rigorous professional training to be a lawyer, but these skills and abilities can equally apply across a range of careers: as leaders in business, politics, and public affairs. Hence, a law school must educate its students in a manner that allows them to pursue a diversity of careers. We must equip our students with a fundamental understanding of law and the ability and skills to work through large bodies of documents, carefully and quickly. While we expose our students to the requirements of the profession, the University is not a substitute for professional training. In that sense, the law school can train a student to be eight-tenths of a lawyer, and leave the rest to the profession.

As a Rhodes Scholar with postgraduate and doctoral degrees from Oxford University, how do you think Indian pedagogy compares to global teaching methods?

British legal education is split into two parts: the academic stage at the university, and the professional stage at vocational schools for solicitors and barristers. Hence, British university law schools emphasise more on theoretical and foundational understanding of the law. The American law school combines both academic and professional learning into a 3-year postgraduate law degree, namely the JD. In America, law schools offer a wide range of clinical programmes and externships that expose students to live cases, enabling them to be ready for the profession upon graduation. 

Indian law schools have traditionally been shaped along the UK university law school model. The creation of NLSIU in 1987 shifted Indian legal education away from the UK model and towards the American model. Today, the National Law School offers a wide range of clinics, the most extensive internship programme, as well as externships with law offices during the academic term. Nevertheless, NLS is deeply committed to an academic and philosophical approach to legal education. And we do not sacrifice theoretical rigour in our programmes. As a result, the University is the most prolific educator of legal academics in India and has had an outsize impact on Indian legal education, and our graduates are leading scholars across the world.

What do you believe constitutes an ideal industry-institute collaboration in today's context? Could you share some of your pain points that you would like the industry to address?  

As a first step, the University engages with legal professionals who are organised as law firms or as law offices across the world and in India. The ability of professional lawyers to engage with the University on a continuous basis, both by contributing their time to address students in the classroom and beyond, and to make opportunities available for internships and careers, is the primary level of engagement with the legal profession.

The University also engages with various businesses and consulting firms who recruit our students for in-house roles at these entities. It is important that our external stakeholders engage in continuous and mutually beneficial relationships with the University. For a public university, these relationships will be asymmetric. We are dependent on external stakeholders to provide resources to sustain these partnerships, and feel that our students and faculty will make enduring contributions to these stakeholders over the long term. Hence, the University is currently engaged in building upwards of 300 long-term partnerships with external stakeholders along these lines.

How do you foresee the legal profession evolving over the next five years? What is your vision for NLSIU?

The legal practice will change significantly with the adoption of technology by the Courts, and by the profession. Hence, it is imperative that students keep up with these new technologies, including generative AI, as users and as potential designers of these processes.  

In terms of the vision, the University has begun developing a new strategic plan for the period 2025-2030. In this plan the University will focus on developing strong partnerships with our key stakeholders: the Courts, the legal profession, government and academic institutions in India and beyond. The University will aim to contribute to India’s national development by contributing and shaping the future of law and public policy in India and beyond.

What to your mind is the best use case of Gen AI in legal education that students and faculty should leverage while also ensuring ethical use and optimum adoption for a better learning experience?

The NLSIU has benefitted from being at the cutting-edge of the adoption of technology for legal education and teaching, as well as with the generation of new knowledge on the design of technological models for legal services. Our graduates have created the most exciting startups on digital legal learning, digital platforms for accessing legal services across India, legal databases, as well as generative AI law services. 
The University is committed to being at the cutting-edge of research and development of these new technologies and is currently engaged with the deployment of large language models to address consumer disputes in collaboration with the Department of Consumer Affairs (DoCA) and IIT Bombay. Our current research extends to the regulation of breakthrough technologies in Artificial Intelligence and biomedical services.

Editorial Note: The National Law School of India University is working on a new research project on consumer law with the support of Meta. This project assesses how large language models (LLM) can be used for building public solutions for enhancing efficiency in India’s consumer grievance redressal system. This project is executed in partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay), and the Department Of Consumer Affairs (DoCA) acts as the knowledge partner.

What one piece of advice would you give to law students entering law schools this year? 

Access to legal education is highly competitive with tens of thousands of very qualified school students chasing fewer high quality law university admission spots. I would advise students to not limit themselves to a single university or a city as the only avenue through which they may secure a good legal education and professional career opportunities. The democratisation of access to legal educational materials and professional opportunities will allow all interested and hardworking students to prosper in the profession.