50 Hours Advocacy Boot Camp - A Concept Note.

 50 Hours Advocacy Boot Camp

A Concept Note

The '50 Hours Advocacy Bootcamp' as the poster suggests is jointly organized by Samatha Law Society and Project Complete Lawyer.  This is a program intended to impart basic skills of advocacy and attempt to bridge the gap between the Law School and the Courtroom.    Hopefully, this 'Concept Note' may provide a better insight into the details of the Advocacy Boot Camp.

Bridging the Gap.

Is there a real gap between the Law School and the Courtroom?  The term Courtroom referred to here may take in non-litigation practice as well, for the limited purpose of this note.  The answer to the question would be an emphatic 'yes, there is a gap'.  Now, Let us first understand the extent of the gap. 

The current syllabus in the law colleges is not designed for training litigation lawyers, alone.  The curriculum is generic and intended to prepare law teachers, regulators, and sometimes lawyers and judges.  After the introduction of the dual degree system, future accountants, management professionals, engineers, and doctors take the legal education route.  The end result is that lawyers' training in law colleges takes a back seat, and the fresh graduates will find it extremely difficult to cope up with the functioning of the court system and to engage in other non-litigation areas. 

The problem gets more complex when most of the teachers are from the academic stream, with limited exposure to legal practice.  The legal professionals quite often, do not find a place in the faculty list of Law Colleges.  Of Course, there are exceptional institutions, where they have started industry-specific law teaching and are doing well.  It is the expectation of all the stakeholders of the profession that the Bar Council of India,  may look into the matter and prioritize lawyers training in the curriculum of the undergraduate law courses. 

The vision of Professor Menon about learning law

Prof Dr. N.R. Madhava Menon

Father of Modern Legal Education

It was the vision of the late Prof Dr N.R Madhava Menon, that law colleges focus on the following during their term of undergraduate law course  (1)  to assist a law student in finding the law and ( 2) when the student finds the law to help him assist to interpret the law. For the law graduate after his enrolment as an Advocate would be interpreting the law, for the rest of his life for his clients, in the quest for justice.   

This process of finding the law and interpreting the law does not happen in at least some of the law colleges. The consequence is that half-baked lawyers come out of the law colleges  Most of them do not survive in the Courtrooms for long, except for the fortunate few, who have a close relative in the profession.   Those who survive may need a longer incubation period of 10 to 15 years to settle down in the profession.

Training and Opportunities

We find that law students are trained as Munsiffs and Magistrate, within one year.  Similar is the case of a candidate, who clears the civil service examination. He rules a Revenue District with such short, intensive, and systematic training.  If so, asking a lawyer to wait for 15 years to become an independent lawyer is unacceptable.  

The fresh law graduates, do not have any institutionalized mode of the training facility, for he is left to the mercy of seniors in the profession.  Finding a suitable senior in the profession is again, challenging.  Those of the lawyers who are unable to find good seniors will vanish into thin air shortly after the beginning of their practice.   Providing institutionalized intensive training and affording appropriate opportunities may be one of the important methods to reduce the intensity of the struggling early days of practice.   When such trained graduates are provided with the necessary opportunities, they will grow to become confident independent lawyers.  Such confident lawyers will obviously turn out to become  good judge materials. 

The Constitutional Guarantee and the Growing Economy.

Speaking about the lack of opportunities during these times may be a little, inappropriate.  In a country with a 1.4 billion population and the preamble of the Constitution containing a constitutional guarantee to provide  'JUSTICE - SOCIAL ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL' to all, opportunities are immense and imminent.  A closer reading of the Constitution can motivate a fresh law graduate when he understands that advocates and judges are the ones to fulfill this constitutional guarantee. 

The growing population and the economy could generate genuine enthusiasm for any fresh graduate to join the profession, rather than to try and become a glorified clerk in some corporate offices. We are reminded that not a single business or transaction can happen without legal vetting. and lawyers may not fixed fees, as most of the time it is ad valorem  This statement could give a general reflection about the immense opportunities, in-store.  

Therefore, offering institutional training to lawyers, along the same lines of the training in the 'Judicial Academy' to judges or even better is highly necessary.  Hopefully, the respective Governments or the Bar Council will take the necessary lead in building an academy, to cater to the training needs of lawyers.  However, the legal fraternity cannot wait indefinitely, until wisdom blooms. Hence the organizers propose to conduct a Boot Camp to start with.

The Concept of Bootcamp

The basic concept as mentioned above is to bridge the gap between, Law Schools and Court Rooms.  It is, therefore, obvious that the program is intended for fresh graduates and graduates to be, to tide over the early years of their practice.  The focus of the program would be to understand the jurisdiction of the legal institutions, to promote clinical study and the prepare them to venture into the profession with confidence. and independently  Therefore, the conventional classroom study method is not what is contemplated. 

The course is structured to be completed within 6 months.  During this period there will be 25 hours of interactive sessions, while the remaining 25 hours will be devoted to participants' activities and evaluations.    The interactive sessions may be conducted mostly in the physical mode, while the participant's activities will be online.  All the sessions will be recorded and uploaded to the Moodle Platform, for future reference.

Selection Procedure

The program is intended to develop a database of trained litigation lawyers.  Therefore, the aptitude of the candidates to become litigation lawyers may be an important criterion for the selection.  The maximum number of participants proposed is 30, which includes 15 candidates who are currently pursuing their Final Year LLB and 15 advocates with less than 2 years of practice. 

The selection process will include writing an essay in not less than 250 words on the topic 'Why do you wish to be a Practicing Advocate', and an interview to be held online.  The essay may be written in the Google application form https://forms.gle/FBcR7qTBEnzLPM768

The Training Protocol

There are no regular training protocols for lawyers.  However, there are several materials available, which could be compiled as a starting point.  The methodology adopted by the Kerala Judicial Academy for training Judicial Officers is a good model, which could be customized and used for the advocate's training.   After all, Judges and Advocates are the two faces of the same coin.

The Kerala Judicial Academy has published an E-Book 'Compendium on the Kerala High Court Procedures 2022', which is available on their website https://kja.gov.in/media/ebooks, would be an important tool for the training.  The syllabus of the Supreme Court for the Advocate on Record (AOR) Examination to the extent applicable can also be used.  We may have to compile a similar protocol for the District Judiciary and the Tribunals.  The faculties and participants may contribute towards the formulation of a training protocol for future use, by the end of the present training. Hence it is a continuous process, which will gain perfection day by day.

Organizers and Faculties

The Bootcamp is organized by the Samantha Law Society in association with PCL Foundation (to know more about the Foundation by visiting  https://www.pclfoundation.com).  Senior Advocate Mr. M.R. Rajendran Nair, the President of Samantha Law Society, has agreed to Mentor the trainees and to function as the main training faculty.  He has also curated the scheme of the training   His long experience of more than 50 years in the Bar, would be an enriching experience for the participants. 

PCL Foundation, on the other hand,  pioneered in designing a curriculum for fresh graduates under the Complete Lawyer Project,  based on the writing and speeches of the Late Prof Dr N.R Madhava Menon.   Season I of the Project Complete Lawyer (PCL for short), imparted training for 25 final years LLB Students.  The design of the Project was to enable law students to get trained to become independent lawyers within a maximum period of 2 years. from their graduation.  Hopefully, the PCL team will be able to offer the experience of their research and the conducting of the successful PCL Season I, to the participants  Of course, the contributions of the Law and Justice Research Foundation (LJRF for short) cannot be forgotten, when talking about the success of PCL Season I. You may visit them on their website https://ljrf.in/

Application for the '50 HOURS ADVOCACY BOOTCAMP'

Interested final-year law students and advocates with a practice of less than 2 years may apply by clicking the following link 

https://forms.gle/FBcR7qTBEnzLPM768