Law and the mind: Javeed Khan’s dual degree, published research and corporate-law placement at Parul University!

Javeed Khan is building a career that is contrary to the stereotype of a law school student. He has done an LLB in the sixth semester at Parul Institute of Law and an MA in Clinical Psychology; both are not one after the other, but they are run in parallel. He is 23 years old, hails from Metpally in the Jagtial district of Telangana, and is the first one in his family to become a lawyer. He has received a placement offer from the Training and Placement Cell, MLPL, Kanpur, in Corporate Law.

He sees the psychology and the law as one project and not two. His curiosity about the process of thinking came first, and his observation of what he saw happening in his family and the world brought him to the field of law to help make a difference in people’s lives and to help him understand how they think. The combination is the thread that runs through everything that follows: a published research paper, four law internships, four psychology internships, and a view of an advocate’s job that owes as much to the study of people as to the study of statutes.

The dual degree is the most distinctive thing about Javeed, and it was deliberate. He has worked in both areas, using his distance and online education centre at the university to obtain his MA in Clinical Psychology and conducting his LLB studies at the university. An attorney’s skills are reading people, reading the client, and reading the other side; as he says, the psychology of people is integrated into the practice of law. It’s not something a student can easily say, and even more so one that’s so coherent, as his description of legal practice perpetually comes back to the ways people think, talk, and make decisions. He is straightforward about the lessons he learned from being surrounded by students from various states: the way people from different regions think, speak, and view the world, and how it affected him. As a formal student of the mind, a campus that had him surrounded by those people was itself a sort of fieldwork.

Javeed’s sense of direction moved in stages, and he is clear about each. He first thought he would prepare for the judiciary services, then concluded it was not the right field for him. He next turned to litigation and interned in litigation settings with it in mind. The final shift, to general corporate law, rested on two considerations he states directly.

The first was a teacher’s read of him. Professor Ganesh Pandey, who taught in the law department and left in Javeed’s second year, told him litigation could work but that his research skills and his way of writing and preparing material suited corporate law better. The second was personal and practical. As a first-generation lawyer carrying a responsibility toward his parents and family, Javeed wanted a path that supports steadier, faster career growth than litigation, which usually takes longer to establish. Corporate work, built around companies and firms, made more sense for where he stands. With his CV ready, he went to the Training and Placement Cell, which placed him in his first corporate internship at MZM in Delhi.

Javeed completed four law internships in four semesters, spanning a civil court, firms of different scales, and corporate practice in four cities.

The step from litigation to corporate work was a real adjustment. At MZM Legal in Delhi, his first corporate internship, the opening week was hard because the work did not run the way court work does. In litigation, as he describes it, the focus is on going to court and watching proceedings; in a corporate matter, the team hands an intern the general shape of a problem and expects the intern to decide what to research, what to do, and how to plan the legal approach, counterarguments included. Many of the other interns there were from national law universities, and comparing his work against theirs was part of how he learned. That Delhi experience, he says, is what later helped him at Luthra and Luthra.

At Luthra and Luthra in Hyderabad, Javeed worked as a research intern on the litigation team. Because the firm does not share full case details with one-month interns, his seniors gave him a short brief of a matter and the legal proposition at issue, and his job was to search High Court and Supreme Court judgments from earlier years for authority that would help, then bring back the judgments, orders, and decrees. The seniors’ one repeated instruction became the lesson he took from the whole internship: just read whatever comes to you and whether it seems useful or not, because a lawyer keeps studying for life, and knowledge is what gives the work its power.

One matter stayed with him. The firm acted for the defence in a prosecution under the Arms Act, where the accused had pointed a weapon at another person in public and had made a confession during the police inquiry. The defence examined the police documents and argued that a confession made in police custody was not valid, and Javeed identified Balbir Singh v. State of Punjab (1993) as the precedent supporting that argument. He also put a harder question to his senior: why defend someone who appeared to have acted deliberately? The answer reshaped how he understood the work. Everyone has the right to a defence, his senior explained, because the Constitution guarantees every person liberty, and when someone comes to an advocate for help, it is the advocate’s duty to protect them, whatever the circumstances. The justice system and the judge decide what is right and wrong; the advocate’s job is to protect the client and to serve what they have studied.

Alongside the internships, Javeed co-authored a published research paper, The National Green Tribunal (NGT) and Corporate Accountability in India, in the Indian Journal of Law and Legal Research (Volume VIII, Issue III, ISSN 2582-8878, pages 4247 to 4254), prepared with guidance from Professor Ganesh Pandey. It examines how the National Green Tribunal, constituted under the National Green Tribunal Act of 2010, holds companies accountable for environmental damage.

The paper is built on three principles the Tribunal applies, and setting them out is the clearest way to see what the research covers.

Through landmark matters including Sterlite Industries, Art of Living, MahaGenco, Zira Distillery, and illegal mining cases, the paper traces how environmental compensation and restoration have become enforceable obligations rather than voluntary gestures and how that has pushed companies toward environmental due diligence and corporate social responsibility. It is honest about the limits too, naming enforcement delays, thin institutional resources, the constant balancing of development against protection, and corporate resistance to Tribunal decisions. For a student heading into corporate law, the subject sits exactly where his field meets regulatory compliance and corporate governance.

Javeed’s four clinical psychology internships ran in parallel with his law placements, all of them online, one in each of his first four semesters: Psycho Shiksha, then Socially Souled, then Cognizavest, and Socially Souled again. In one stretch of May 2026, he was interning at MZM Legal in Delhi and completing a psychology internship in the same month, which is a fair picture of how he has run the two tracks at once. The psychology is not a detour from the law in his telling; it is the half of his training that explains people, while the law supplies the rules they operate under.

Javeed counts easy access to AI as one of the real advantages his generation of lawyers has over the ones before it, which had neither AI nor the internet nor mobile phones. His position on it is measured and worth setting down, because it matches what his seniors drilled into him. AI, he says, is just a tool, and its value depends entirely on the intention of the person using it: used well, it offers good ideas; used carelessly, it does the opposite. A person who leans on AI even for the simplest tasks may, in time, lose the ability to draft a plain letter or a basic application without it. The tool is a source of help; the lawyer’s own work and judgment have to stay at the centre.

Javeed came from South India to North India for the first time when he joined Parul, a change of state, culture, and language, and he settled in well enough to call it his best years, and the campus, in the rains, was more beautiful than he expected. He lived in the hostel for one year, then moved to campus and spent two academic years as a member of the accommodation team in Samvidhan Pe Charcha, the university’s program for constitutional awareness, which was likely to continue for another year.

He mentions three in particular: Professor Ganesh Pandey, who guided his research and directed him to pursue a career in corporate law; K. S. Girish and Dr. Dixita Suthar, his first mentor at the university. He and his friends used to study in groups at the Subhash Chandra Bose Bhavan library, where he resolved doubts and conducted case studies together, which he attributes to helping him pass exams and complete his dissertation. His placement offer from MLPL, Kanpur, followed the same pattern as his internships: both came through the Training and Placement Cell, so he got holistic practical exposure and placement support at every level.

Asked what he would tell first-year students surrounded by noise and other people’s opinions, Javeed answered from his psychology as much as his law.

Don’t think about what people think about us. Do not worry about them. Change your perspective. Live in the present.

He added the one habit he treats as non-negotiable, drawn equally from the advocate’s duty and the psychologist’s training: listen to both sides before you judge, because that is what makes a sound decision possible. Between that, his seniors’ instruction to read constantly, and his own rule that AI is a tool and not a crutch, his account comes down to a consistent way of working rather than a list of achievements.

SOURCE AND CONTEXT. Based on a student profile of Javeed Khan, sixth-semester LLB, Parul Institute of Law, Parul University, who has also completed an MA in Clinical Psychology there. His placement at MLPL (Maylawyers LLP), Kanpur, is an offer secured through the Training and Placement Cell; as a current student he has not yet joined, and it is described as an offer. Balbir Singh v. State of Punjab (1993) is the precedent he identified during his internship research, reproduced as his account. Family and friends named in the source are omitted. The quotation is his own; other remarks are reported. Links to the published paper, PU programmes, MZM Legal, Luthra, and MLPL carry no tracking parameters.

• Javeed Khan, sixth-semester LLB and MA in Clinical Psychology, Parul University; placement offer from MLPL, Kanpur
• Parul Institute of Law, Parul University
• MLPL (Maylawyers LLP), Kanpur, his corporate-law placement offer, via the Training and Placement Cell
• MZM Legal LLP, his first corporate internship, Delhi
• Luthra and Luthra Law Offices, his research internship, Hyderabad
• Professor Ganesh Pandey, faculty who mentored his NGT research and advised on corporate law
• Indian Journal of Law and Legal Research published his paper on the NGT and corporate accountability

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