Justice Rajesh Bindal in Open House with Law Students at Parul University

Parul Institute of Law, Parul University, organised an Open House Interaction titled “A Space for Dialogue and Meaningful Conversation” with Hon’ble Justice Rajesh Bindal, Former Judge of the Supreme Court of India and Honorary Professor at Parul University, on 1 October 2026 at the Lakshya Seminar Hall. Questions came from the floor, and Justice Bindal answered them as they arrived, so the session moved freely across mediation and arbitration, legal careers, the judiciary, artificial intelligence, privacy, legal aid, and victim rights. His answers drew on decades at the bar and bench, and he often began with a small, practical example before widening it into a larger point. What follows are the main threads of the conversation.

Mediation, Justice Rajesh Bindal said, takes real skill. It is not a matter of seating two parties in a room and talking at them; bringing people in conflict to the same table is a genuine challenge, and the skills can be learned. The first is to listen, because people in a dispute often feel that nobody is hearing them.

“Patience is most important.”

He noted that mediation and arbitration have become full-time careers in their own right, where once they were an evening pursuit after a day in court, and he called the field a very good career as the emphasis on settling disputes keeps growing. On the wider question of scope at a time when jobs are hard to find, he laid out the routes plainly: the government side, including legal services, law officers, prosecutors, and the judiciary; private practice in law firms and offices; and corporate legal departments. What should decide the choice, he stressed, is aptitude. A person who enters an area they do not enjoy will not give it their full effort, and that shows over time.

Asked how the two roles differ, Justice Bindal said a person who wants to earn should go into practice, though the early years take time to bear fruit, while a person who wants to serve should find the path where they feel satisfaction. On whether cases ever affected him, he said emotions do not normally enter a judgment, yet custody disputes and matters involving small children can be felt because the very people being fought over are sometimes used to settle scores between parents. Such feelings, he said, are momentary; the case still has to be decided on the law and the material before the court.

He was candid about first impressions. A judge may form a view during arguments that the full record later changes, and the complete reading often comes only when the judgment has to be written. He recalled two matters, one in the High Court and one in the Supreme Court, that looked one way after arguments and another once the documents were read in full; in the second, the court heard the matter again so that injustice would not be done to the parties.

For students who want to litigate, his first instruction was to be serious about the bare Acts. Statutes such as the Code of Civil Procedure recur in case after case, and a lawyer who does not know the provision, or whether one exists, will be lost; this holds even for those heading into judicial services rather than practice. Internships matter only if taken seriously, he said, not treated as a visit for a chat and a coffee. He recalled that when he began in 1985, juniors were told to sit in court in their spare time, because watching how the bench questions a lawyer and how the lawyer responds teaches what no classroom can.

“The biggest computer is our brain.”

Moot courts build the same muscle, he said, because a student must argue, face an opponent, and answer the court’s questions on the spot, which develops the spontaneity a real courtroom demands. He then passed on the first lesson a senior taught him: study your weak points, not only the arguments in your favour. Every case has two, three, or four weak points, and a lawyer should have an answer ready for each, because the other side will press exactly there. On building a profile for firms or judicial services, he said it is built at the student stage through scores, articles written with a teacher, projects, and moot courts, and that an interviewer can tell within five minutes whether a candidate actually knows a subject.

“Credibility is being fair. Don’t try to be smart.”

The judge before whom a lawyer argues often has experience exceeding the lawyer’s age and can see through a great deal, so a wrong impression at the outset colours everything that follows. The rest, he said, is thorough preparation, which is remembered whether a case is won or lost.

Artificial intelligence took up the longest stretch of the session, opening on a warning.

“Don’t outsource your thinking.”

People increasingly act on whatever AI gives them because they do not want to think, he said, and courts in the United States, England, and Australia have faced the same problem. AI works only on the facts fed into it, so it should assist the user, never overtake them. He traced how dependence grows through small habits and people who no longer remember routes or phone numbers and warned that an unused mind becomes useless, and then the machine controls the person. He tied this to a wider collapse of attention, calling shortened attention spans a major problem of the present and urging students, in a profession that demands deep attention, not to let themselves be distracted.

In legal research, he drew the sharp line between an authorised portal, where a judgment is real, and an open-source tool that can simply invent judgments that then get cited. He gave a Supreme Court example in which a lawyer cited a passage that, when the book was checked, turned out to be the minority view in a constitutional judgment, an avoidable embarrassment.

“You have to cross-check everything. Take the help of AI and take the help of technology, but verify what they give you.”

Justice Bindal explained how data gets fed into everyday usage, whether it was search engines keeping track of what people are searching for, or passwords based on easily guessed personal information, then fingerprints, and face recognition. He reminded people that the Supreme Court has given a ruling on the right to privacy and warned that claims that sites do not use personal data are wrong – photos which families upload can be taken and used. But technology can also be used to harm, he said, via deepfake videos and manipulated images, and the large platforms should be held accountable for that by withholding it from publication and putting in a prominent warning that people will notice, not a line they’ll ignore that’s written on a cigarette pack. Voice cloning is one of the challenges, he said, as it can yield a new song sung by legendary singers who have long since gone away.

He recommended that the judiciary develop its own software; that is, don’t store confidential information on open tools or cloud info, because data put on the cloud trains the system. He commended UPI as a unique portal in the world that is now adopted by other countries and how digital payments empower a vendor or rickshaw puller to save money without losing a day’s earnings at the bank, thereby enhancing their creditworthiness.

Asked what single thing he would change, Justice Rajesh Bindal spoke about the weight on the system: roughly 20,000 to 23,000 judges against a pendency he put near 5.7 to 5.8 crore cases. Judges alone cannot fix that, he said; much of the responsibility sits with the lawyer community, because a matter that could be resolved at the first stage is sometimes turned into dozens of cases, with some parties who lived together only weeks spending fifteen or twenty years in litigation. Reform, in his view, comes when everyone works together.

He urged students to associate with the legal aid system, pointing to the large number of under-trial prisoners and to a low conviction rate that means many who are tried and sometimes held for years are later acquitted. He noted that the position of victims has improved under the new BNSS, which gives victims notice, a right to information, and a say in the process, making it participatory in a way it was not before.

The session kept returning to one idea. Justice Rajesh Bindal told students to ask questions and to use their minds, because one person’s question leads another to a different question, and that is how new ideas form. A lawyer’s eyes have to be open to everything, he said, since no one knows what kind of case will come. Heavy dependence on technology, he warned, reduces the chances people get to use their own analytical abilities, and for law students in particular, the ability to read, analyse, question, and respond independently is the foundation of the whole profession. Explore law programs at Parul University, including B.A. LL.B., B.B.A. LL.B., B.Com. LL.B., and LL.B., and build a strong foundation in legal studies to pursue diverse career opportunities in litigation, corporate law, legal consultancy, and other areas of the legal profession.