Today, I want to tell you the story of how contract drafting helped me and Ramanuj Mukherjee (CEO, LawSikho) build our startup from scratch.
When I quit my law firm job to focus on the iPleaders blog, our income for the next few months was uncertain.
However, Ramanuj and I had to meet our costs. We had to pay rent.
We had a flat in an old building in South Mumbai which belonged to my father’s friend, who charged us a very reasonable rent. Yet, the cost of food, rent and electricity together easily came up to a little over INR 50,000 per month per person. After all, tony South Mumbai was that expensive, even back in 2012.
What did we do? Firstly, we moved to a tiny apartment in Nerul, Navi Mumbai to cut costs big time, to around INR 15,000 per month per person. And we took up contract drafting work to survive. I worked on an investment agreement for one of Ramanuj’s startup clients, who was raising a big investment to grow his venture.
Ramanuj was still working in a law firm then, so I worked on the deal with another friend who had quit his job recently.
It got me enough to pay rent. That was great.
By next month, Ramanuj had quit too! At the time, he used to volunteer at Startup Saturday, a network of young entrepreneurs, which had a monthly meetup. He did some contract review work for a company which was into corporate training. One more month’s rent was in!
Then, there was a CA who used to send us contracts to review. Sometimes, a startup friend would want us to review an LLP agreement. Someone wanted help with a vendor agreement. The work kept flowing in, and we charged INR 5,000-10,000 for every contract.
Our goal at the time was to build our startup, not to kickstart a legal practice. We did what we had to do to keep the lights on and put food on the table. So we didn’t grow this work a lot, and only took up what was needed to meet our expenses, so we could focus on our startup.
After a few months, we started receiving revenues from the courses that we had launched, and could work full-time on our edtech business.
But it was contract drafting that saved us when we needed a steady stream of income the most.
That is the potential of contract drafting. It is the most voluminous work and easiest to get for young lawyers. It pays well. It helps you keep the lights on while you are pursuing your passion, which takes longer to bring in the dough.
This is also a big reason why we are very excited to host our free upcoming bootcamp on international opportunities in contract drafting. We drafted contracts only for local startups and businesses. The opportunity is now much bigger with international remote work having arrived on the scene.
What if you need to earn some money quickly on the side? If you are a lawyer, you can draft a few contracts and earn some cash quickly, in relatively less time. Even better if you can draft international contracts.
It is like a superpower!
I realised how important contract drafting work is from my life experience back in 2012.
So will you, just join our bootcamp and see the power of learning contract drafting. See the power of learning how to get freelance drafting work.
The challenge
You may not want to build a startup like we did, but as a young lawyer, you will be struggling to earn well no matter what you do. Even in big cities, law graduates struggle to find well paid work. In smaller towns, the situation is even worse.
Nearly 2 lakh lawyers graduate in India every year, but less than a thousand probably find employment that really pays well, or crack the UPSC, Judiciary, or other competitive exams.
What happens to the rest?
More than a decade ago as young lawyers, we were struggling to pay our bills in Mumbai. The cost of living is far higher today, but traditional income opportunities have remained stagnant.
Young law graduates can no longer afford (nor do they want) to attach themselves to a senior who will pay them peanuts for the next 3-5 years. And nobody knows how and when they will find an opportunity to grow their careers.
After five years of law school, is that all you can look forward to?
Almost no senior/ law firm will waste time and money training juniors, either simply owing to a lack of time, or the fact that once trained, the juniors are likely to move to another employer who will benefit from that training.
In short, nobody will teach you anything once you’re out of law school. You will have to learn on the job, through trial and error.
That includes contract drafting, which is the most basic and fundamental skill any lawyer should have, but very few actually do.
The triumph
Like all clouds, this one too has a silver lining. In fact, it has two!
- Many sectors are emerging today that were non-existent or extremely low profile even 10 years ago.
Sectors such as tech, real estate, media & entertainment, banking & finance, and a few others have all come up with primarily digital innovations that have spawned a whole new generation of highly successful startups.
And all of them need various new kinds of contracts in huge numbers, which means they need lawyers to draft these contracts in areas ranging from technology to intellectual property rights to mergers and acquisitions to real estate to cryptocurrency.
- We are here to teach you how to find amazing opportunities in these emerging sectors. Besides boosting your contract drafting skills in existing and traditional practice areas too.
We will teach you how to draft some key contracts as well as how to find work. What do you have to do? Just come to our FREE, LIVE, online bootcamp on ‘International opportunities in contract drafting’ from May 6-8, 7.00-10.00 pm IST daily.
No recordings, live only, if you miss you miss. So make sure to attend live.
Set a reminder for 6.55 pm each day so you do not miss even a minute. Block till 10.30 pm each day on your calendar.
Trust me, a proper, in-depth knowledge of contract drafting can change your lives as it did ours.
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