Lawyers not Lawyering
Join the community at www.lnl.network
TL;DR: Forming a community to connect law grads who are pursuing professions other than law to those lawyers / law students who want to take baby steps outside the profession. Join the community at www.lnl.network
I quit law in August of 2018, exactly 2 years and 3 months after I started in the profession. While my tenure as a lawyer had definite upsides, one of them being able to observe business transactions at a macro level once the business aspects of a deal had been finalized; there was always an inkling to get into the thick of things by moving to the business side.
In 2018 the opportunity presented itself and I joined Kstart as a as a part of its Fellowship Programme.
During this phase when I was planning to shift and post my shift, I had the opportunity to have meaningful conversations with a handful of people in India and abroad who were on the same boat as me: Each of them had studied law and had pursued a career in law but were now pursuing professions other than law.
There were management consultants (Abhilasha (NLS ’15 — Deloitte India) who I co-founded the group with), public policy analysts (Rajendran (HNLU ’16 — LAMP Fellow) classmate and dear friend), entrepreneurs (Hrishikesh from Vakilsearch who I had the good fortune of working with at Kalaari, Sachin at Humlabs who is laying the foundation for the nascent legal tech ecosystem in India), MBA’s (Karthik M., former Partner at Shardul Amarchand, now at MIT Sloan), Product Manager’s (Harshvardhan (NLS ’11 — Product Manager at Flipkart) and lastly law students (Amol & Pranav at NLS) who were way smarter than their years and we’re planning for careers outside of law in their final years of law school.
Speaking to all of them not only reassured me that studying law does not impair you when it comes to pursuing a career completely detached from law and also helped me get access to something very crucial to my shift: the first line of mentorship that any human being requires before jumping into something new. The biggest challenge for a law grad wanting to pursue a profession other than law would simply be a lack of information: the lack of being able to be mentored by someone who has already spent some years in the pursuit of something similar, so that one can take an informed decision and can benefit from the learning curve that their predecessors have gone through.
That being one and support: Law is somewhat difficult to quit given the material comforts one begins to associate with the practice of the profession. It takes an enlightened soul to show the path to a fellow lawyer; that there is a world outside of law which holds opportunities which might be much more rewarding than the practice of law itself.
At the other end of the same story, Abhilasha who had gone on from being a corporate lawyer at Khaitan & Co. in Mumbai to a management consultant at Deloitte India, had found much needed help from NLSIU Bangalore’s highly mature alumni network who were already entrenched and established in several alternative professions.
When we connected in December, 2018 we realised that we were mutually motivated to leverage our collective networks, and provide a platform to: (a) connect lawyers / law grads with other lawyers who are pursuing professions other than law; (b) provide the first line of mentorship to those who want to explore opportunities outside of law.
With that in mind we started putting together a group on Whatsapp with our professional connects, who qualified as Lawyers not Lawyering.
As of today our membership is 108 strong. Members work at 44 different non-legal organizations:
- Legally India
- Paytm
- Skylark Drones
- Philip Morris International
- Humlabs India
- Vahura
- McKinsey & Company
- myLaw Learning Resources
- Vakilsearch
- Artistik License
- Flipkart
- Vayam India
- iPleaders
- Sattva Consulting
- Winning Matters Consulting
- Advok8
- Walnut Knowledge Solutions
- Deloitte Consulting, New York
- Designical
- Gathr
- Anheuser Busch
- Lawfarm
- Walnut Knowledge Solutions
- CredAble.in
- WeGot Utility Solutions
- Deloitte India
- The Hello Foundation
- Teach for India
- Kaleidofin
- RecruVia
- Kstart
- Dmagi
- FSG Management Consulting
- Derek O’Brien & Associates
- Leegality.com
- Swayam Farmer Foundation
- AffordJustice
- Centre for Internet & Society
- Deutsche Bank
- Plane Crazy Studios
- Recycling Technologies Ltd.
- Skorkel
- JSW
- New America
and went to on to study subjects other than law at:
- Harvard Business School
- Booth School of Business, University of Chicago
- Sloan School of Management, MIT
- Columbia Business School
- Said Business School, University of Oxford
- Yale School of Management
- London Business School
- Florence Design Academy
- Fletcher’s School of Law & Diplomacy, Tufts University
- Indian School of Business, Hyderabad
- Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
- Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow
- Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Sciences, Mumbai
While the community is presently on WhatsApp, we are looking at options to scale it (moving it to LinkedIn/ Facebook/ MightyNetworks) and potentially take it global and maybe across professions (Accountants not Accounting :D ).
We have planned meetups in Delhi and Bengaluru on February 16, 2019 where we look forward to catch up and learn more from our peers. Meetups in other cities are also being planned as we write. And suddenly so many Lawyers who look forward to pursuing careers other than law seem to have a new set of professional connects !
In case you are a Lawyer Not Lawyering or a law grad looking to pursue a career other than law, sign up here www.lnl.network
Best,
SS & AM
Abhilasha was a part of the batch of ’15 of NLSIU, Bengaluru and went on to work at Khaitan & Co., Mumbai. She is presently a management consultant at Deloitte India in Gurgaon.
Subhro was a part of the batch of ’16 at HNLU, Raipur. He went on to work at Jerome Merchant + Partners, Mumbai and IndusLaw, Bengaluru. He is presently a Fellow with Kstart, the seed fund of Kalaari Capital, in Bengaluru.
