The First Case Shouldn’t Be After Graduation: Rethinking Practical Legal Training

Judicial Perspectives on Practical Legal Training

Indian courts have repeatedly treated the quality of legal education as closely connected to the quality of the legal profession itself. The underlying concern is straightforward: a law degree is not only an academic qualification. It is preparation for a profession in which the way a lawyer applies to the law can directly affect clients and the administration of justice.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Bar Council of India v. Bonnie Foi Law College & Ors., decided in 2023, is particularly relevant here. The proceedings began with issues concerning the affiliation and functioning of a law college, but they eventually raised a wider question about standards in legal education and entry into the legal profession. During the proceedings, a committee constituted by the Court examined issues relating to legal education and professional training and, among other things, emphasized the importance of a bar examination and apprenticeship or training before admission to the Bar. These were recommendations and observations of the committee, rather than requirements independently formulated by the Constitution Bench. The Constitution Bench, however, recognized the Bar Council of India’s regulatory authority over pre-enrolment requirements and upheld its authority to conduct the All-India Bar Examination. The significance of Bonnie Foi for the present argument therefore lies not in the judgment having itself imposed a general requirement of practical training within the LL.B., but in its recognition of the BCI’s broader regulatory role in ensuring that entry into the legal profession is subject to appropriate professional standards. This provides a basis for considering whether practical and competency-oriented training should be strengthened within the LL.B. itself, rather than treating professional competence as something to be developed only after graduation.

The position becomes even more interesting when this judgment is read alongside V. Sudeer v. Bar Council of India [(1999) 3 SCC 176]. In V. Sudeer, the Supreme Court had struck down the Bar Council of India Training Rules, 1995, holding that the BCI could not reintroduce pre-enrolment training through its rule-making power after the relevant statutory provisions had been removed. At the same time, the judgment recorded that practical training was already contemplated as part of the three-year LL.B. curriculum under the syllabus prescribed by the BCI.

That position did not remain on the law. In Bonnie Foi, the Constitution Bench reconsidered V. Sudeer and held that it had not laid down the correct position of law. The Court concluded that the BCI’s role before enrolment was not excluded and that it had the power to prescribe pre-enrolment conditions under the Advocates Act.

Taken together, these decisions show that questions about legal education are not treated by the Court as merely academic ones. Training, professional standards, and competence are closely tied to the way the profession functions. The judgments do not, of course, prescribe a single model of experiential education, but they do reinforce the larger point that becoming a lawyer involves more than simply acquiring theoretical knowledge of legal rules.

Employability and the Market Reality

The changing nature of legal work makes that distinction increasingly important. Legal careers today extend well beyond traditional litigation. Law firms, in-house legal departments, regulatory and compliance functions, arbitration practices, legal technology, policy organizations and other specialized areas have all become important parts of the professional landscape.

That change has also affected what employers look for in new graduates. Academic performance remains relevant, but employers also want to know whether a student can do the actual work. Can the person research a legal issue properly? Can they draft a usable document? Can they communicate with a client? Can they understand professional responsibilities and work through a practical problem rather than simply identify the relevant provision of law?

There is useful empirical evidence for this from the United States. The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System’s Foundations for Practice project surveyed more than 24,000 lawyers across all 50 states about the knowledge, skills and professional characteristics needed by entry-level lawyers. Its findings showed that when respondents were asked what would be most useful in identifying candidates who possessed those foundations, they pointed towards experience-based indicators, including legal employment, externships, law-school clinics, recommendations from judges or practitioners, and other forms of experiential education.

That evidence is American, so it should not simply be presented as proof of hiring behavior in India. What it does show, however, is that the gap between knowing the law and being able to use it is a recognized issue in legal education beyond India as well. The relevance to Indian legal education is obvious: practical exposure can give students an opportunity to develop skills that examinations alone cannot fully test.

In that sense, experiential learning serves as a transition between university and professional life. The value is not simply in having an internship listed on a CV. It lies in whether the experience allows a student to research, draft, analyze, communicate, observe professional decision-making and learn from mistakes under supervision.

ADR and the Skills It Demands

The growing institutional importance of Alternative Dispute Resolution strengthens the case for practical training.

Arbitration, mediation, and negotiated settlement require a different combination of skills from those needed to perform well in a conventional written examination. A lawyer working in these areas needs to listen carefully, identify the client’s real interests, communicate clearly, negotiate effectively, and assess legal and commercial risk.

India’s legislative framework has also continued to strengthen the place of ADR. The Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 has been amended on several occasions, including in 2015, 2019 and 2021. The Mediation Act, 2023 further developed the statutory framework for mediation, including pre-litigation mediation in civil and commercial disputes. The Act came into force on 9 October 2023.

These developments matter for legal education because many of the abilities required in ADR cannot be developed through lectures alone. Negotiation exercises, mediation simulations, client-counselling sessions, and supervised practical work allow students to experience the uncertainty and judgment involved in real disputes. That is useful not only for future litigators, but also for lawyers working in transactional, advisory, and corporate environments.

Technology and the Changing Shape of Practice

Technology has added another dimension to the discussion. Legal practice is increasingly influenced by artificial intelligence, legal analytics, contract automation, electronic discovery, and digital compliance systems. The practical question for law schools is no longer whether

technology will affect legal work; it is how students should be prepared for a profession in which technology is becoming part of ordinary practice.

The National Education Policy 2020 recognizes the need for higher education institutions to engage with disruptive technologies and develop skills relevant to changing employment patterns. It specifically refers to technology-related skilling and job readiness and also identifies the possibility of multidisciplinary “AI + X” programmes, including in law.

The legal profession is already experiencing some of this shift. Thomson Reuters’ 2025 research on professional services found widespread expectations that generative AI will become part of professional workflows, with legal professionals reporting increasing use of AI for efficiency and productivity. The report also highlights the importance of training, governance, and professional judgment as these tools become more common.

This makes practical exposure particularly valuable. Students who work on legal-tech projects, regulatory research, compliance exercises or technology-related legal problems are not simply learning another technical skill. They are learning how legal judgment interacts with new tools and new forms of work. As more routine tasks become capable of automation, skills such as analysis, strategic thinking, client communication and ethical decision-making become even more important.

How Other Countries Are Handling This

India is part of a broader international movement towards competency- and practice-oriented legal education, although the mechanisms used by different jurisdictions vary considerably. The value of these comparative models lies not in copying any one system wholesale, but in identifying specific features that may be adapted to the Indian context.

In the United States, the American Bar Association’s current 2026–2027 Standards require every J.D. student to complete at least six credit hours of experiential courses. These may take the form of simulation courses, law clinics, or field placements. The standards also require experiential courses to involve performance, feedback, self-evaluation, and supervision. The principal lesson for India is therefore curricular: practical learning can be made a defined and assessable component of the law degree itself, rather than being left primarily to optional internships or post-graduation training. At the same time, the U.S. model operates within a different legal-education and accreditation structure, so its six-credit requirement cannot simply be transplanted into the Indian LL.B. without considering differences in course structure, institutional capacity, and professional regulation.

England and Wales adopt a different approach, with greater emphasis on competency-based professional qualification. Under the Solicitors Qualifying Examination route, candidates must complete two years of qualifying work experience, and the Solicitors Regulation Authority describes this experience as an opportunity to develop the competencies required of a solicitor. The SQE2 also tests practical skills through exercises involving client interviewing, advocacy, legal research, legal writing, and legal drafting. For India, the relevant lesson is the use of clearly identified professional competencies as an organising principle: practical training should not be assessed merely by whether a student has completed a prescribed period of internship, but by whether the student has developed identifiable skills that a competent entry-level lawyer should possess. However, the English and Welsh model is situated within a distinct qualification route and professional regulatory framework, making direct transplantation inappropriate.

Australia, particularly New South Wales, offers a third model. The Legal Profession Admission Board recognizes Practical Legal Training providers as part of the admission pathway for lawyers. The relevant lesson here is the use of structured practical legal training as a formal component of professional qualification. Rather than relying entirely on the

quality of individual internships, a structured training framework can specify the skills to be developed and provide a more consistent basis for supervision and assessment. Again, however, the Australian admission framework differs institutionally from India's, meaning that the model is better understood as a source of design principles than as a system to be reproduced in its entirety.

Taken together, these jurisdictions therefore offer three distinct lessons for India: the United States demonstrates how experiential learning can be incorporated into the law-school curriculum; England and Wales demonstrate the value of competency-based professional qualification; and New South Wales demonstrates how structured practical legal training can form part of the pathway to professional admission. Of these, the most readily transferable approach may be to combine elements of all three rather than replicate any single system: a defined experiential component within the LL.B., explicit competencies that students are expected to develop, and structured practical training supported by meaningful supervision and assessment. Such a framework would also address an important limitation of simply increasing the number of internships. An internship does not necessarily produce meaningful practical learning merely because a student has completed a specified number of days or filed the required paperwork. The quality of the work assigned, the availability of supervision, the opportunity to perform tasks rather than merely observe them, and the quality of feedback can all affect what a student actually learns. The objective, therefore, should not be to maximize the quantity of practical exposure but to create a system in which practical learning is structured, supervised, and assessed against identifiable competencies.

Where India Still Needs to Improve

India already has much of the regulatory foundation required for more practical legal education. The larger challenge is implementation.

An internship should not become valuable merely because it ends with a certificate. The quality of the experience matters much more than the document a student receives at the end of it. Students should have meaningful work, clear supervision, and some form of feedback so that the experience contributes to learning rather than simply attendance.

The same principle should apply to legal aid clinics. Closer links between law schools and district legal services authorities could give students a more meaningful understanding of the problems that people actually bring to the legal system. The aim should not be to place students in situations beyond their competence, but to allow them to participate in real legal work within appropriate supervision.

Law schools could also make greater use of simulations in areas such as drafting, negotiation, arbitration, mediation, and client counselling. These skills are particularly difficult to assess through conventional written examinations. Competency-based assessment would make it possible to evaluate whether a student can perform a task rather than merely explaining how it should be done.

There is also a structural issue. Access to high-quality practical opportunities should not depend entirely on how well an individual student can find an internship through personal contacts or repeated cold emails. Stronger partnerships between law schools, courts, firms, government institutions and other legal organizations could make experiential opportunities more systematic and evenly available.

Finally, regulators should look beyond the number of internships or clinical placements offered. The more important question is whether students receive meaningful work, supervision, feedback, and reflection through those experiences.

Conclusion

The case for experiential learning in legal education does not rest on one judgment or one trend. It emerges from several directions at once: judicial concern about professional standards, evidence on what helps new lawyers develop practical foundations, the growing importance of ADR, the technological changes affecting legal work and reforms in legal education internationally.

The traditional model of legal education—strong doctrine and examinations, but often less consistent when it comes to practical exposure—does not fully reflect the demands of modern legal work. A graduate entering the profession may be expected to research an unfamiliar issue, draft a document, communicate with a client, assist in negotiations, understand professional ethics, or work with technology within a very short time.

For India, this is particularly significant. The legal profession operates across an enormous range of courts, tribunals, firms, companies, public institutions, and specialized practice areas. Preparing students for that environment requires more than teaching them what the law says. They also need opportunities to understand how the law is actually used.

Experiential learning cannot replace legal theory; it gives that theory a practical setting. The real task for legal education is therefore not to choose between the classroom and practice, but to connect the two well enough that students do not encounter the professional world for the first time only after they graduate.

Footnotes:

1. Bar Council of India v Bonnie Foi Law College, (2023) 7 SCC 756.

2. V Sudeer v Bar Council of India (1999) 3 SCC 176.

3. Law Commission of India, 184th Report on Legal Education and Professional Training and Proposals for Amendments to the Advocates Act, 1961 and the University Grants Commission Act, 1956 (2002).

4. Bar Council of India, Rules of Legal Education, 2008.

5. Ministry of Education, Government of India, National Education Policy 2020.

6. Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS), Foundations for Practice Survey Overview and Methodological Approach (2016).

7. Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice, Report on Strengthening Legal Education in India (2024).