The Workshops at Samvidhan Pe Charcha 4.0, Parul University: Advocacy Craft and the Constitution in the Digital Economy

Ms. Kirti Dubey. She is a legal trainer. She is also the founder of Lawspectus. She took the session of how every litigator the craft they should have but only a few are taught. It is the art or skill to turn a client’s confused and emotional account into a clear legal plan. A lawyer might know every rule, law and regulation in the book, she said. But those who can handle a client and their messy story are able to crack it.

She started with the skills and advised students to sort a client’s account into nine elements. Starting with material facts and allegations to emotions. Then assumptions and irrelevant detail. Next is She said then build the case in four steps. That are a neutral fact inventory. Precise legal issues, the law-fact-proof chain, and most memorably, preparing the opponent’s case as if it were their own. Always knocking on the doors of court is not the answer. She said a good lawyer is the one who weighs time, cost and risk and the best resolve matters quickly and cheaply. As she moved towards ending, she said that a good lawyer is the one who knows the law book. But a great lawyer is the one who is able to understand the mind of the judge.

Mr. Nihit Nagpal Associate Partner at S.S. Rana and Co. conducted a session on Innovation vs Regulation. His key question was how an AI, protection of data, protection of e-commerce, and the internet can be governed by a Constitution that was drafted before the internet. The starting point is always a constitutional right which has been infringed on, be it the right to privacy enshrined in Article 21, the right to free speech under Article 19, equality, the right to trade, the right to consumer protection or the right to the Constitution that is the custodian of those rights, when a new technology threatens to infringe on one of them, then the law follows, he said.

He demonstrated the way in which the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary operate within that context from the IT Act to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, from the intermediary regulations issued by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) to the judicial interpretation of a right to privacy in Article 21. He explained to students, using his own experiences, how he practices for influencers when they get discredited, how he argues a John Doe suit against a platform and the Basic Subscriber Information that can lead to a takedown, and how intermediary safe harbour is explained the way he sees it, as something akin to a shopping mall with many shops. His warning on the use of AI was to the point: Check all authority; a fabricated case should never go to court.

Mr. Zafar Khurshid, Advocate of the Supreme Court and Co-founding Partner at TKC Partners LLP, read the theme “Samvidhan or Adhikar” as “aur, not or,” because rights and duties are inseparable, and ran the session as a charcha rather than a speech, posing questions to the room. Equality, he said, means equity rather than sameness, “to treat equals as equals, and to recognise that when some people are historically unequal, then the law itself must treat them in a manner so as to bring them to a level playing field.”

Liberty, he said, is more than freedom from arrest; it is the freedom to live fully, with due process standing between the citizen and the state. Dignity is what holds both together, “something you are entitled to from birth” that does not end even in prison or at death. He was honest about the gap between promise and reality, from manual scavenging to undertrials who wait years for a trial, but asked students to hold on to the progress made and to keep questioning. His analogy of the race, giving the person on a horse a car and teaching them to drive so they can genuinely compete, was the one students were most likely to remember, and his challenge to them was to carry a disproportionate responsibility for fixing what the country has not yet fixed.

Also Read: Parul University’s Fourth Edition of Samvidhan Pe Charcha: Valedictory Ceremony