One Thing I Wish Law Students Knew: Build Expertise In Areas That Interest You Most

Law school gives you two things the profession will immediately take away. The first is agency. Nobody is telling you what to read, which brief to prioritize, or whose deadline matters more than yours. The second is time itself, uninterrupted and self-directed. Once you start practicing, both disappear. A client calls at 7pm on a Friday. A partner needs a memo by tomorrow morning on a subject you've never touched. Your calendar stops being yours.

Your career, in the long run, gets shaped less by what you choose to learn and more by what gets thrown at you. That's not a complaint about practice. It's just how the profession works, and it's not going to change. Which is exactly why the years before it starts are so valuable. You have the rare luxury of choosing what you get good at, without anyone else's priorities competing for your attention.

So here's the practical version of the advice: pick two or three areas, while you're still in law school, where you commit to knowing more than your peers. Not a passing familiarity you can talk about at an interview. Actual depth. Read the entire commentaries, not just the assigned chapters. Read the case law, including the dissents and the overruled decisions that explain why the law moved the way it did. Argue it out in moots. Write papers on it, even ones nobody will publish. Do this for a subject you have some visceral pull toward, because depth built out of genuine interest survives the grind; depth built for a CV entry does not.

I watched this play out with people I studied alongside. The ones who wanted to litigate didn't just take a procedure course and move on. They went deep on the Civil Procedure Code or the Evidence Act the way some people go deep on a hobby. They knew the amendments and the conflicting High Court positions. When they walked into their first briefs, they weren't starting from zero.

This doesn't guarantee a straight line from law school subject to career outcome. Markets move, firms staff you on whatever the client needs that week regardless of what you chose to specialize in, and plenty of people build deep expertise in something that never becomes their practice area. That's fine. Depth built early doesn't lock you into that subject. What it still gives you is a working demonstration of how to read law properly and form an independent view without a senior person handing you the answer. That's the part that transfers even when the subject doesn't. Someone who read every judgment on landlord-tenant law with real rigor will out-argue someone who skimmed constitutional law broadly, in almost any adjacent dispute. So pick the subject with some care, but don't agonize over picking the "right" one.

When I started building what became one of India's first dedicated VC practices, back in 2012, there was no senior partner to apprentice under and no established playbook to read. Indian startup law barely existed as a category. What let me operate in that vacuum was having built, earlier, the habit of reading source material properly and thinking from first principles when there's no precedent to lean on. That habit is portable. It doesn't matter what you build it on in law school. What matters is that you build it deeply enough, on something, that "reading everything and forming an independent view" becomes second nature before you're forced to do it under a client deadline.

This is also, frankly, a bet against how legal education actually trains you. Law school optimizes for breadth: a working knowledge of many subjects, tested well enough to pass and move to the next one. That's necessary, but it's not sufficient, and it's not where your competitive advantage will come from.

You have the time now. You won't again for a long while. Use it on something real.