• Do you know what is the number one skill required by a lawyer?
• Do you know what is the one skill that fresh law graduates lack due to which they are not the most preferred candidates in companies and big law firms?

Answer to both of the above questions is drafting skills

And this is true irrespective of whichever area of law you land in - whether it is corporate law, intellectual property, criminal law, M&A - whatever.

Go back to the first day of your first law firm internship and what is the first task that you remember getting from your senior?

Proofreading contracts?

Do you remember how lost you were that despite spending three years in a law school you had no clue how to make real sense of those clauses of the contracts that you were handed over for proofreading?

Say, you were asked by your senior to review a contract and add the necessary exclusion clause basis the negotiation brief provided to you. You ended up staring blankly at it and later complaining to your friend how lost you were on the first day of your internship.

Get this: your employers or clients are going to be businesses. Businesses are set up to make profit and profit is generated by transactions. In order to crystallise obligations in any contract, you need contracts.

Lawyers are required to draft contracts, agreements, notices, plaints, responses on a regular basis. Being able to draft and review contracts is a survival skill. Without this skill you’re unlikely to be chosen for hiring by either companies or law firms.

You’re unlikely to get good internships either, because no one has the time to sit you down and explain how to draft a specific contract.

Instead of aiming to learn drafting during an internship, just imagine - what if you could show and offer really good drafting skills right at the time of your joining in and not only free up a lot of training time for your seniors, but also add up value to their work. This is the holy road to a PPO.

Or imagine being able to financially support yourself while you are still a law student, by undertaking freelancing work of contract drafting and vetting for clients not only in India, but also for other countries.

All this is possible just by learning one basic legal skill thoroughly - contract drafting.

And despite this obvious importance of contract drafting skills, what is the current picture?

You’ll be surprised to know that even law graduates are mostly clueless about how to draft a contract from the scratch.

They may be able to explain the theory of contracts by rote, or tell what happens when a party breaches a contract but when asked to frame an indemnity clause for the firm, they will get nervous, puzzled and end up copy- pasting from a template which may or may not be suitable for use.

The biggest victims of such practices are the clients as a badly drafted contract can cost your client millions - remember, the enforceability depends on your drafting.