At the close of the Legal Apprentice Challenge, organised by Careers360, we are pleased to announce 21 winners who have been given a chance to intern with Anand and Anand.
From the very off, the competition focused not on the rote rather asked students to step out of their comfort zone. The students gathered college experiences from five of their peers, since the ability to influence and engage with peers was an entry barrier to the competition. This was followed by a burst of creativity, as the contestants identified three snippets from television and movies, and elucidated the IP related aspects with a catchy tagline of their own.
They then wrote articles, applying legal principles to contemporary global issues, such as Drones, Artificial Intelligence and Bolar Exemptions. Beware! The opinion in the article may have been easy to envisage, but they would have to defend it on an interactive public platform. The sub-themes of each of the seven topics being thrashed out on Facebook groups; a microcosm of the modern legal professional.
All in all, the practical aspects of the Challenge were a thorough test of students’ interpersonal skills, logic, reasoning and advocacy.
The competition provided a great learning opportunity not just for the thousands of students who participated in the competition, but also for our custom developed “KnowBot” that applied Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning concepts to supplement the evaluation process. Implementation of Artificial Intelligence concepts, hitherto applied exclusively to Big Data, threw up interesting insights, as our KnowBot blazed through the submissions. It has indeed been revealing to apply these technologies, that are emerging in the IT industry, let alone in the legal field.
And perhaps that’s what this competition highlighted most, that the educational system has course-corrected at a noticeably slower pace than industry and industry expectation. Gone are the concepts of the tie-myself-to-the-desk; employers look for creativity, initiative and curiosity. This applies not just to students, but also professionals who need to embark on a journey of lifelong learning.
Certainly, at Anand and Anand we expect innovation from all our members, as the firm is driven by its innovation ethos. We look forward to welcoming the 21 winners of the challenge, who get an opportunity to intern with our firm.
Read more about Challenges of graduating to the Real World and Rise of Autodidacts in the Knowledge Economy
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