 artificial intelligence will be a threat or a boon to the industry, whether you're discussing with justice in law, what would be the explosion of the case law, explosion of the cases, the rising dockets of the cases. These all trends and a lot of us discussing about as to whether the foreign companies would take over or the other companies would take over and the individual practice, whether they'll be a threat, whether all these aspects requires to relook, revisit and reinvent ourselves with emerging trends. These all are the broader contours on which the session will be taken forward. Since it's a working day at a lot of places except for in Punjab Rihanna High Court and Delhi High Court where we are having vacations, we thought that why not utilize this time for a betterment of the knowledge sharing, be that as it may, all these YouTube sessions what we have taken are already on the YouTube in case you have missed. Justice Rajiv Sai and Law Shores sessions are also there which are doing extremely well. Without taking much time, we thought that since it's a working day, we will take a session which is short and crisp. As normally we speak when we talk of short and simple because we did one session and that word just ticked in me. It said that in any precise and concise drafting, it has to be, you have to say it's kiss, keep it short and simple. See that's why we have set the session to be small but to the point and without taking much time, we will request sir to share his insights of his journey as a lawyer then as a judge and thereafter again as a lawyer. What are the challenges he has seen as they say, and what he feels that we have to tune ourselves, sharpen our tools to match with the changing trends in the society. Over to you sir. Thank you Mr. Chhatrat. A very good day to all of you who are watching now or as Mr. Chhatrat says, who may happen to watch the recording later. And friends, let me share one thing with you. Whenever earlier I did not want to read and I wanted to watch something while sleeping or something, the only content available which I used to watch on YouTube was the short films and those short films I found very engrossing and I realized that maybe what we were used to watching in a three or four hour film the thought or the story was being communicated to us in about 10 to 15 minutes and which I always found very interesting. The good thing about the initiative which Mr. Chhatrat and some others like him have taken is that now we have a choice besides the short films or other content which is available on YouTube or other platforms. If we want to just hear somebody or just see that what is available on a particular subject relating to law or on any other subject on the YouTube, there is a lot of content available and thanks to people like Mr. Chhatrat for the same. So it's a human duty which you are doing to knowledge sharing. Now friends, you may be wondering that how I am qualified to speak on challenging challenges for lawyers with emerging trends. I consider myself qualified because I've had a occasion to be a part of the legal profession for the last over 40 years. I have witnessed the change in the century. I commenced my law practice in the previous century in the 1980s and continued in the next century and I failed when I was talking to Mr. Chhatrat that what is worth placing for consideration of others on this platform is that we need to discuss that how we people as lawyers and especially young lawyers need to prepare themselves for the future and how the profession of law and how the lawyers are required to behave are changing. The second important thing which happened that as a practicing lawyer most of the time we are not at least I was not observing the profession as such one was so engrossed in one's own cases and putting it before the court and then running to another court that you were not really bothered that what challenges the lawyers were facing or how different lawyers were behaving or coping with the matters or the changes which were happening in the court. But about 14 years as a judge which I got an opportunity in the Delhi High Court I think the biggest observation period was that as compared to the 25 years before that which I had been a lawyer. So as a judge I got an opportunity to see on an average about 50 to 100 or more lawyers every day and I was able to watch them dispassionately rather than in an adversarial mode. So that I'll be speaking for your consideration or placing with my thoughts before you from that perspective. And as Mr. Chhatrat mentioned I have for today's discussion I won't really call it a discussion since it's not interactive or today I have chosen five trends which I want to place for your consideration and if I may just in a nutshell say the first trend is the much more competition in the legal profession than what it was at the time when I joined the profession. The second trend which I'll be placing for your consideration is the change in the nature and character of disputes which are coming before the court and which the lawyers today are required to argue or defend or plead before the court. And yet another which has hardly been spoken or written about but which according to me is very important is the explosion in the case law availability of case law and my assessment is that that explosion has led to a slow death of judicial precedent. The fourth topic which is I'm very passionate about and which I have spoken of at several other platforms and for which reason I am restricting my time for that today because most of my thoughts on that are already available is the effect of introduction of artificial intelligence in the legal profession and how it is a challenge to the legal profession. And the fifth and the last again very important but which I think we need a separate session is the challenge of the commercialization of the legal profession. So in a nutshell these are the five topics of the trends which I'll be touching upon today. Now coming back to the first one about much more competition in the legal profession today. Friends at the time I'm talking in the context of the time when I joined them today. The time when I joined the legal profession the legal profession was the last resort of those who were on the threshold of their working life or who were in the process of choosing the careers. So the best of the minds who had done well in schools and colleges were not coming to the legal profession only those would be joining law who had not got admission into any other career and with the result and out of those who joined the LLP course also most of the brighter ones went for other competitive services examination got selected in that and only those who were not able to get employment or a career opportunity anywhere else were coming to the court to practice law. So this resulted in a very small number of people and who generally represented a category which had not done well in exams which they had been required to take till then at the school level and at the college level joining the legal profession. So out of those few who joined it was very easy to shine with a little bit of effort or with a little bit of common sense but that is something which has changed today totally. Today you have what I have been noticing since I have been getting a lot of youngsters earlier as associates in my law office and subsequently as law clerks as a judge or as interns at both the places is that today we have the best of the students who are opting LLP as a career choice immediately after school or after college and the students who have secured very high marks in whichever stream of examination or subject they have chosen and out of those who complete their LLP course also most of them are coming into litigation or are becoming lawyers whether practicing on the corporate side or in the courts. So what the lawyers are having to contend with today is much more competition for each brief or each assignment you are competing with the very best of the people the best of the students the best of the youngsters of your age and who have who are used to scoring high who are used to winning in the exams and who want to continue the same trend in their professional career as a lawyer also. So the level of competition has gone up tremendously and that is a trend which nobody can miss and all of you must be already aware. So to shine in the legal profession takes much more than what it used to take earlier so you cannot rest on your laurels of the law college or anything because you never know from where somebody who may not have learned the art of cracking the exam learns the art of cracking how to put the matter best before the court or in a corporate transaction before the regulatory authority how to put the matter best how to ensure that the approvals are expeditiously obtained how to negotiate with the opposite with the opposite contracting party. So today you have to prepare yourself much better each lawyer is required to do much better on a day to day basis than he was required to do in earlier times. Now it's fortunately for us it's the work for which a lawyer is required has also grown tremendously today the need for lawyers is being filled in avenues where earlier nobody thought of involving lawyers or consulting lawyers but that doesn't underscore the fact that you have to be at the best because if you do not deliver somebody else will deliver or somebody else will be able to convince the client that he could have or he has done the job better. So that is the first challenge which are a trend which I wanted to place for your consideration. Now coming to the second which is of the change or the shift in the nature and character of disputes which are coming before the court. In my times when I joined the civil disputes which were coming before the courts either related to immobile property or related to money recovery suits or some other commercial transaction which had gone wrong or relating to employment conditions or service conditions these were the basic if they formed the core of the civil disputes which were for adjudication and all of which were more governed by law than by the facts there was not much dispute about the facts and the application of law for which the lawyer was in any case trained or which the lawyer knew where to find the lawyer was able to deliver his duty but today what is happening before the court is that see there was a big pool of landlord and tenant cases all over India that class of litigation as far as Delhi is concerned has died down totally because with the change in law and with the realization that even if you overstay in the property by delaying the litigation you were still liable for mean profits and which could be recovered from you today the number of tenants which are who are fighting their eviction are much fewer than what the number which was there earlier so that category that class of litigation has totally disappeared today what we have disputes most of the good paying disputes which are coming before the courts are rights in data so you have to learn everything about data rights in computer so softwares rights in the source code of the computer software disputes as to cryptocurrency disputes as to stock exchanges money if you see today the financial packages which most of the investors are advising to their clients today and from which the disputes arise are very complicated they have several elements in it so if a dispute arises all those questions have to be gone into then money that how how how the money is invested how it moves how it how it is to be invested technology patents psychology because in trademarks psychology is being applied then there is a new form litigation about plant varieties so for which the court has to decide that which seed falls in which plant variety there is another very large genre of litigation which has opened up is about trade secrets or about confidential information which is shared between the two parties having either a contractual or other relationship and the disputes about which there is no law as of today so these are the cases which are coming before the court now how does it make a difference because see the law on all these subjects the new subjects of disputes which are coming before the courts is also evolving so the law as we all know basically evolves on the facts good facts make good law and bad facts make bad law so the application of law to facts relating to all these disputes is still at a very nascent stage so it becomes very important unless the lawyer understands himself that how the software source code of a computer software works or what is the confidentiality in the data which is shared or what is a trade secret and I'm not going into the plant varieties or the patents disputes which are there or psychology why do we why does the mind how does the mind perceive two different trademarks what is the test to be applied that of similarity of this similarity of trademarks so all this is requiring the lawyers to study so much more subjects now nobody can be can be a master of all the subjects or in your school or graduation become an expert in economics or physics, chemistry, biology but what is required is to develop a mindset so what I am seeing is that only those lawyers are doing well today or are scoring over others keep an open mindset who are open to learning whose entire education has not been based on just knowing how to answer the question or to reproduce what is written in the textbooks in the answer papers but the lawyers who as students have always tried to go to the root of the matter or asked the question why why is it so how does it happen like this why does it not happen like this so even if we are forced or beyond the student stage we have to develop our aptitude or mindset to be able to go to the root of the matter and to find the reason because only when we as lawyers will understand will we be able to convince of course subject experts are available to you to explain because whenever a client comes with a dispute of this nature to you he will know everything about this object but unless you quiz him because he on his own will tell you only what he thinks is relevant and in that also so many things will be what he presumes that you should know because he knows but it's not necessary that we as lawyers will know all those things so it is becoming very important so the only solution which I or which I suggest for your consideration is to increase your extracurricular reading there are a lot of summer courses or other online courses which are available 15-day or weekend courses don't be afraid carve out time to always enroll for those courses so that you are learning on a day-to-day basis in fact I was reading a very interesting news item because I won't say I read the law journal we all know driverless cars are a reality now so in the US district court there has already been a case with respect to an accident caused by a driverless car of course besides the other issues which were involved in that case of jurisdiction because if you see our motor accidents claims cases are based on fault liability to some extent there is a provision for no fault liability but the outcome ultimate outcome is based on fault so now in a driverless car how do you find who is at fault can the owner of the vehicle be said to be at fault if the driverless car has caused an accident because the accident has not been caused by the driver as the agent of the owner that accident may have been caused by either a mechanical failure or by an electronic failure or a software model malfunction now the mechanical failure may be owing to somebody who's beyond the jurisdiction of the court or more likely in the jurisdiction of the court but with respect to the electrical failure and the software malfunction in all probability you will find that the suppliers there of are beyond jurisdiction so one of the case questions which arose in that case was that how do you determine the jurisdiction to adjudicate the claim for the accident but the more interesting question which I wanted to place for your consideration is that the defense of the software ultimate person who had designed the software and malfunction of which software had caused the accident that much was proved before the court that prove itself was a long story but again that is not for today's consideration the defense of that person was that look there is nothing wrong with my software but my software was hit by a virus generated by somebody else and which virus was meant to afflict my software so but he was unable to show that yes there was any virus existing in the software of the driverless car which had caused the accident so his defense was that it was a self distracting virus which after causing the malfunction disrupted itself and there was no trace of it so that defense was successful in that case I have not had the benefit of reading the judgment to find out that how it was proved but imagine to be able to convince the court the lawyer has to understand all those things he has to not only make innovative arguments of readings with respect to jurisdiction by application and extension of new legal principles but he has to also understand that there is something like a self distracting virus and to show that indeed the malfunction of the software was afflicted by that software by that virus so I found that very interesting and I was really wondering that how we will all cope with this when these kind of issues start coming before the court so the need of the R is to develop our minds and our attitude to be always continuously learning new things and interacting with different kinds of people reading different materials besides law we all get so engrossed in our practice of law that we forget to read any other subject but that time is now passive and I would request all to commence reading on other diverse subjects you never know which day you will be required to deal with other such issues now friends the third thing which I wanted to touch and which as I mentioned earlier I find hardly anything has been written about or spoken on this subject is about the explosion of case law in my time when I had started the profession besides the local journals of Delhi which were available who were reporting only judgments of the Delhi High Court the national journals were very few most prominent among them was of course all India reporters, Supreme Court cases then there were on the company side there were company law journal company cases labor law there were labor law cases labor law journals but the reportage over there was very limited because paper was costly plus the journals had to travel to far off places so there was a limit on the number of judgments which could be published over there so there was pruning of what was published at two stages each High Court had its rules High Court as well as Supreme Court that the judges who were authoring the judgment were also required to indicate at the top of the judgment whether the judgment was to be shown to the law publishers or publishers of legal journals or not and or the language in Delhi High Court used to be whether the judgment is reportable another column used to be that whether the judgment is to be shown to newspapers so the judges were required to indicate yes or no against those two columns so the judges also when we joined as judges we were told that the way to decide was if you felt you were saying anything new or enunciating a new principle or applying the old principle of law to facts which had not been applied earlier then you we used to make it reportable otherwise we would say not reportable it was if it was only a application of facts which had been done in so many cases earlier but then came the right to information act and at least the thought in Delhi High Court when we did away with that column at the top of the judgment was that the author of the judgment has no right to restrict its circulation it is a judgment pronounced in open court so it should be available to also we did away with that column so there was no pruning at the judge level of what was reportable and what was not reportable the second important development earlier you see the publishers of all India reporter and Supreme Court cases used to also do the pruning they could not if suppose there were 50 reportable judgments from each high court in each month they could not publish all the 50 so they used to do the pruning themselves that they would decide which is more important to be reported and pick up one or two judgments from each high court and publish it in their reporters but because they were also limited by as I said weight of the journal and the cost of paper but with the internet and with the physical journals nearly disappearing and the online journals coming into work and being prescribed by most of the lawyers today vis-a-vis the physical journal the publishers also are able to publish all the judgments so there is I find there is a race amongst the publishers also who is publishing more number of judgments because it doesn't cost anything to them to publish all the judgments whether reportable or not reportable so today what we are finding is that not only all judgments which do not contain any new principle of law but also daily orders are being reported and available on the internet and which results in that they all constitute case law so if today you have to argue on a proposition and you take 10 judgments out in support of the proposition you can be sure that your opponent will bring equal number of or more judgments on the contrary because ultimately the judges whose writing he is deciding the cases on the basis of application of law to the facts of the case so a lot of times it happens that the facts of the case require the application of law in a particular manner and which the judge does in earlier times the judge would simply say not reportable because the judge is not doing anything or expanding the law or taking it any further but today with the judge having been left with no such option all those orders also are reported and they'll be cited against you and you have the lawyer has to face the challenge of then convincing the judge that why that judgment is not to be applied and the judgment which you are performing or relying upon is more up to the facts of the case which are for adjudication in that case so that fringe according to me is a very big challenge which today is facing the legal profession and my assessment of course it's very individual to me is that this has resulted in dilution of the importance of judicial precedent in the court and which is a very dangerous thing the death of judicial precedent would result in all matters being decided on the basis of equity today already we have reached a stage where a lawyer is unable to give an opinion if a client comes to a lawyer and says that these are my facts whether it is worth filing a case or these are the facts with which the opposite party has filed a case whether it is worthwhile to contest the case today the lawyer is not in a position to say anything because tomorrow a judgment may come which may have said totally to the contrary I have faced this in between while I was still on the bench and opinion had come from the supreme court that if one of the parties to a contract termination the contract terminated the contract and the other parties used for specific performance if he had not sued for declaration that the termination was bad then the suit for specific performance was not maintainable applying that judgment I myself dismissed so many suits for specific performance which were then pending before me in which that relief had not been sought or which were coming up for admission before me but then after about three years that view was changed so this is what I am saying that it is not as if there was earlier there was no requirement there was no judgment which said that without seeking declaration of illegality of termination you were debarred from seeking specific performance so in the fact of some case the supreme court took that view and that view when I myself dismissed must have dismissed some 20 odd cases on the basis of that and I really wonder what happened to those cases because if they chose not to go and appeal then those people have been denied the right of specific performance which they may have validly had so that has become the biggest challenge that today the lawyer has to plead or defend the case without much reliance on judicial precedent and the lawyer is not in a position to give any opinion on the matter because as the case progresses even if the judge at the first level has failed that in the facts you are not entitled to a case another judge at a affiliate level in the same facts may find so the death of judicial precedent would result in cases being decided by inequity or on the basis of what is the view of the judges of the last court on the facts of the case so the only suggestion which I have for the legal profession on this is that you have to own your ability to separate the shaft from the grain so you have to really be a better lawyer to place that look this is the fact and this is how the law applies and why that case was decided was because of this different factor peculiar fact in that now friends coming to the fourth trend is the introduction of artificial intelligence which again till now has entered India to a very limited extent but when one meets about the American ports in the American ports it has infiltrated the legal profession to a very large extent the biggest use which I have been able to find from my readings about the American legal system is one is that in due diligence today out of the maximum number of graduates from the law colleges are being absorbed in law firms and which are in the practice of corporate law in a large part of corporate law is of due diligence because of the mergers and acquisitions which are happening or even in the regulatory framework when they are required to make disclosures before the regulatory authorities so doing all that requires somebody to go through a large number of documents so generally fresh law graduates who are hired they are guided by the senior people in the law offices or the law firms to in each page look if there is any reference to expise it and if there is a reference to expise it to flag that document to be shown to the senior person to further see how to use it for the assignment similarly if you see as a lawyer I had a case where it was a large estate P estate which was being transacted and what the seller company had represented was that it's free from all litigations and the law firm which was engaged by the purchaser did the due diligence and did not find reported that there was no litigation but ultimately after all the monies had been paid and the acquisition of the P estate was complete it turned out that there was a suit for specific performance already decreed on the date of the transaction with respect to the part of the T estate which used to yield the T fetching the maximum price in the international market and in that case I learned that the price of a T estate is not governed by how much acre of land for the area of the T estate you are transacting the price of the T estate depends upon that how much does the T grown in that estate fetch in the international and the national market so the particular patch which was fetching the maximum price that there was already a degree for specific performance and when we went through all the documents again what we realized is what the lawyer who had done the due diligence missed out was that in the books there was a reference to payments to certain lawyers now if the due diligence had been good they would have immediately picked up that alright why are these lawyers being paid which is the case or which is the opinion or which is the work for which you have made the payment and that investigation would have yielded that case which had already been decided now today in America there are softwares in which you can feel that alright it will go through lakhs of documents and point out flag out to you that out of these lakhs of pages which have been perused by me I find on pages XYZ there is a mention of this thing now the work for which a large number of lawyers were engaged or for which they were employed is being done by machine so the lawyers used to work what take maybe 30 days in going through the entire documentation of a company but now that machine can do that work in maybe a couple of days instead of 30 days so the billing hours go down this thing goes down another very important thing which is happening is the American courts that trial is very very expensive so that is why you may have heard already that a large number of suits are settled at the stage of negotiations or the pre-trial stage so for that and another peculiar thing about US court is that once the trial commences generally it's on a day-to-day basis so it is decided by the same judge so there they have the data of each and every judge available and all that a litigant has to do is to feed that data into the and feed the facts of his case into that software and find out that how is this just likely to decide my case so which is resulting in again elimination of a lot of lawyers so it sounds very frightening at the moment that what happens when all this and I give an example of see we used to have these horoscope makers in India in the Indian context but who would charge anything from 500 rupees to five lakhs rupees to draw the horoscope of a newborn baby or of anybody who would want the horoscope drawn up today it's all computerized you can walk into any shop and get it done for 50 rupees or 100 rupees so artificial intelligence will cut down a lot of work which the lawyers do and because the software and the machines being used on repetitive times are cheaper they even if a lawyer is using it for his benefit he may not be able to build the client so much but the good part of it is that the human touch would still be required because the profession of law let us not forget is a profession where a litigant like the patient with a medical problem comes to the lawyer in a pain in a distress and the soles and the comfort which a lawyer or a human being can give that can never be given by a machine so even if a person having a potential dispute or to go to a chaos and feed the facts of his case and what his opposite party is saying and ask for an opinion he would he is unlikely to be satisfied he'll find more comfort in talking to a lawyer so the what my reading has shown the solution for that is that the lawyers are typically known to be very rough and they think they know the laws so they don't they are sometimes not very patient with their plans so we have to learn our internal personal skills better they should according to me be special courses on blind handling and how to give soles because say long back I think in 16th century it was said that the trust of council is the biggest trust between man and man so the lawyer is the litigant is coming to you in trust that you will guide them or give them the correct advice so that quality will remain that requirement will remain so yes we have to be prepared for it it is a challenge which the legal profession is faced with but as for other challenges there is a solution to it friends we have already completed our time span I just highlight what I wanted to say about commercialization of the legal profession see commercialization and what is the difference between commerce or a profession or a business or a profession when you go to the shop to buy something it's a purely commercial dealing but yeah it is as I mentioned earlier it's a question of trust and he is coming to you of course he is paying you for your time but he is trusting you for telling correctly when I go and buy a refrigerator from a Roma shop whichever refrigerator I am picking up I am depending upon how that manufacturer has done that there is no this thing about the shopkeeper any trust between the shopkeeper and me as the buyer now that but what is happening in a large number of what I find the legal profession to be forgetting is that they are forgetting it is a profession and they are treating it more and more as a business or a commercial relationship and that can again have see one is it will cease to be a noble profession as it has always been called the state share or the dignity which the lawyers as of today command in the society that will go down you will be like any other shopkeeper you will be like any other businessman who is there to make money and in the legal profession it will be very difficult see today we are seeing from consumer claims but civil claims in some matters are already being made as far as really is concerned against lawyers or negligence and if the client sees that you are acting business like in profession he will not hesitate to file litigations against the lawyers which we see increasingly being done against the doctors and God forbid we should not have a situation like we are already having in the hospitals of the doctors being under attack we don't want a case where the litigants in the court become use physical violence against the lawyer for having not done his duty. Thank you very much Mr. Chhatrat I think I've exceeded by three minutes you are muted Mr. Chhatrat. Maybe the person who was moderating wanted to show the devil of the artificial intelligence and intelligence that you can be controlled by someone else also but I personally believe that the attention span of nobody is beyond 30 minutes I personally when I watch I like to watch for 20 minutes it all depends if actually like if we in one of the discussions we were discussing that you can't compare apples and pineapples like today's session we divide it to five parts so once you're dividing into five parts the participants who are watching it he knows that part one is over part two it's just like a sequel so there was something more to be watched and what more to be understood and the way you have taken the entire session into different parts and all were actually mesmerized at least I can say for myself there were a lot of key takes which you have given to us interpersonal skills that's what I'm also talking to my associates and young lawyers who sometimes ask that gone are the days where simplicity you had to have good communication good writing skills communication of course includes the writing skills good oratory again part of the communication skills law research these were there but now not only you are asked to write in a drafting cell but at the same time you are looked upon where you can write certain articles just to hammer a point I'm reminded of your associate Ahmed George writing very well on different aspects especially the way he took your legal journey when you demanded the office so there are a lot of key takeaways and if one actually takes it and even during vacations right you likely rightly said one should read not only law because all during all these sessions it was learned that a good lawyer is not limited to his knowledge to that of the law itself I was hearing to one of the sessions of Mr. Kapil Sebel even of Dupal Subramanian on live law and a lot of speakers they all come to the common point that you have to read sociology you have to read history because the lessons learned from all these books are also important which you actually do not know but actually when you are making submissions in the court or in the normal life also they actually do help and the way it has caught up the session during the youtube I was watching it it's actually doing very well and I know that even though that it was an office ask for many or students time where there are exams if it's doing well it will continue to do well we only request that keep on blessing us because certain sessions or interpersonal skills awfully we have actually started shiftings are focused towards this interpersonal skills how to draft I had made a submission to the former advocate general Karnataka Mr. Uday Hola and he has agreed on in the month of July to take a session on how to think as a lawyer and to one of the speakers we have requested that he should give a session on what is to be drafted and what not to be drafted in the written statement because we feel that these are certain things which at least during our times where we were never taught we learned unlearned ourselves we all learned during the flux of time with the experience by watching experience but now there are courses which teach them so we thought let's try that journey especially like people like you who have been blessing us with your guidance so thank you everyone stay safe stay blessed and tomorrow's session would be we will be taking around good quick questions on court of civil procedure especially focused on for the purposes of judicial exams but again since timings of different courts are different he's from Madurai so he will be taking session at 9 p.m tomorrow but do stay connected with us everyone stay safe stay blessed and thank you sir once again for sharing your knowledge it's always a pleasure connecting with you virtually and outside the this platform also thank you thank you