Join Master Access - Grow your practice rapidly by getting into new and exciting practice areas and learning new skills
Myths That Need Not Stop You
- I need grey hair to succeed as a lawyer.
- I need to be born into an elite legal family to succeed in the profession.
- I should not specialize early in my career.
- By specializing, I will lose clients and it will be hard to manage.
- Business development is solicitation and therefore illegal.
- If we follow the footsteps of successful lawyers of the previous generation, we will succeed.
- Successful lawyers don’t need any management/ customer service/ technology/ marketing/ administration to run our practice profitably.
- It is better to practice in the Supreme Court or High Court rather than tribunals or lower courts.
- I must charge less than big law firm partners to get work from a client.
- Big clients will prefer to go to big law firms only.
- I have to pay my juniors less. It would take a long time to train and onboard junior lawyers.
- I live in a small city or town - there is no work here and an absence of good opportunities. The legal profession is unfair. Seniors don’t pay or train, or invest in their juniors because juniors will leave.
- The expectation of clients or seniors is very high.
- The market is bad - we can’t do anything.
If you are a law firm founder or an independent practitioner, answer the following questions truthfully (to yourself)
Don’t worry even if you answer quite a few of these questions in the affirmative. These are not real problems - the real problem is somewhere else and these can be fixed quite easily.
But for now, just go through these questions and statements and see if anything resonates.
- Do you struggle to find new clients at times?
- Do you feel that some clients don’t value your expertise?
- Do you find clients at times asking for specialized or customized services that you do not provide?
- Do you struggle with clients driving your prices down because competitors are ready to undercut?
- Do some clients underestimate your ability to deliver results, or question your experience?
- Do you find it difficult to charge and justify higher prices for your services?
- Do you feel confident in competing with more experienced lawyers?
- Do you want to identify new practice areas where you can deliver high-value services but not sure how to go about it?
- Do you find it hard to chase big mandates because of a lack of bandwidth, experience and an effective team?
- Are you worried about stagnation in your practice, while your batchmates or juniors get promoted and earn more?
- Do you ever worry about being caught unprepared in a client meeting or in the courtroom by judges for not being on point?
- Are you concerned that lawyers with less capability are doing better than you because they are better at promoting themselves?
- Are you concerned about failing to build a brand name over time?
- Do you often complain about not having any free time for your friends and family? Are you overworked and stressed?
- Do you feel dissatisfied at the end of your day and wonder if you should just accept a job?
If your hard work is not paying off, you may be missing something. It is time to pause and reflect.
And we have helped many lawyers like you with these exact problems. We will tell you how. Just hold on a little bit more.
What a high-growth small law firm or independent law practice looks like
Financial freedom
The legal profession is a very profitable one. You have eliminated low margin work and unreasonable clients that exhaust you. You do not take up work where financials are not justified.
Your income is growing by leaps and bounds month on month. You can have the lifestyle you want to have. Your income far outstrips your expenses and you are able to invest most of your income.
Work-life balance and peace of mind
Freedom from the crazy work schedule and backbreaking work pressure, you work at your pleasure. You have total control over your time. Thanks to a great team behind you, you choose when you want to work and when you want to take a break.
Secure pipeline of clients and new work
There is a strong pipeline of work. You have regular client development activities planned and the machinery you have built ensures a steady flow of work.
Growing brand name and reputation
You have built a strong brand in your area of work. Your clients talk about you positively to other potential clients and recommend you. The market considers you to be a premium service provider.
You regularly write articles, blog posts, appear on interviews, webinars and TV debates, your social media is highly engaging and clients follow you to receive regular updates about your area of expertise.
You are considered a leading authority, thought leader and influencer in your area of practice. People look up to you for innovative solutions, new ideas and predictions.
Talented young lawyers seek you out for an opportunity to work with you and learn from you. You have no difficulty in hiring. You are not afraid that talent may leave.
You are able to pay your lawyers really well. You reward high performers. You have a terrific work culture and even lawyers who leave once after being poached by top law firms want to come back very soon. High-quality lawyers are leaving jobs with big-name places to join you and work with you.
What is stopping you from getting there?
Here are the top 5 challenges for small law firm owners and independent practitioners:
Ad hoc approach to client acquisition and learning
Waiting to get the work before learning new skills. Asking the clients directly for work without taking the initiative to build and showcase your work. Waiting for an advance before doing your research and preparation.
Knowledge and skill gap in service delivery
Law is a profession where clients want to hire the best that they can afford. If you are a cheap lawyer but your skills are of a lower order it does not help much, but if you are highly knowledgeable, and you do the best work that is available in the market, that is much easier to market. What are you doing to get there fast? Do you have a strategy for this?
Not investing in your own growth
You cannot expect to learn by just doing the work that you normally do over a period of time. The legal services market is evolving very fast. You need to identify new areas and upskill fast, without waiting for years to work under the guidance of a senior, acquire a post-graduate degree or prior experience at a marque law firm. If you have identified that you need help for your growth as a lawyer but do nothing about it, you cannot grow by accident. If you are not specifically investing in your own growth as well as that of your practice, there is very little chance that it is going to happen at all.
Reliance on practice development advice from lawyers of earlier generations who are not in sync with today’s altered reality
Most lawyers depend on practice development advice from specific mentors who are senior in the legal profession and who have built their practice long before, in a different time and age, and in a period of 10-20 years.
Much of that advice does not work today, because the market has completely changed.
What worked for getting a job 20 years back in a law firm, does not apply now. Interviews, job descriptions, policies of employers and processes have all changed, so has competition.
Let's ask you a couple of questions.
First, are you willing to wait it out for as long as they did, to succeed? Or do you want to try out additional steps (over and above what your mentors suggest) to radically speed up your journey?
Second, are you sure that the techniques which worked 10 or 20 years back will be as effective today? Have you seen them working for others around you?
I am not discounting the value of the advice of seniors - it is great to rely on their legal interpretation, understanding of the bench in a particular court and their superior knowledge of litigation or corporate work on specific matters.
However, the practice of law is evolving so fast that you need multiple mentors to guide you in different areas of professional development.
You can do very well with specialized training and mentors for building your law practice. You need to take learnings from other disciplines such as management, digital marketing, brand building, digital transformation and automation etc.
Thinking that law practice is not a business
You might think that the practice of law is poles apart from running a business.
Businesses can advertise and are profit-making, but lawyering is a noble profession.
A lawyer is a champion of justice and a friend of the court.
However, running a successful law practice has several aspects which are common to a business.
For example, content marketing, people management, operations management, financial planning, strategy and process automation - all of these can rapidly grow your practice, if you resort to the right strategy at the right time.
It can take many years to acquire expertise in each of these areas, but those who start early and focus on these aspects do far better than those who resist this idea.
Every single skill you learn in this regard will grow your practice and make it more stable to that extent. What you learn, you will be able to transmit to your team and build systems accordingly.
5 things you need guidance with
- You need help with rapid learning of legal skills and knowledge. Larger law firms can afford to have super specialised partners in every area of practice. To compete with them you need to be able to pick up new and exciting areas of law practice and equip yourself with the necessary skills very fast.
- You need help with great brand-building through the creation of thought leadership content, social media presence, and networking. You can do it very fast with the right help and access to the right platforms and tools.
- You need access to a peer network that is supportive - other lawyers who not only share ideas and latest information with you but also help you to connect with important opportunities. You should also be able to discuss your ideas and challenges with them.
- A ready-made resource base where you can find templates of documents you have to draft, from different types of commercial contracts to litigation related formats. Having the right library of standardised templates can improve the quality of your work and save time in a big way.
- Guidance on managing and developing your practice as you will face different challenges at different levels
5 steps to rapid growth: how we help legal entrepreneurs like you to take things to next level
You do not have to depend on pure luck, or have grey hair or be a second or third-generation lawyer to be recognized in the industry and run a flourishing and profitable law firm or practice.
The roadmap to build a successful law practice or a law firm is not a mystery.
Here are the 5 steps necessary for any lawyer to build a profitable practice:
Step 1: Learn how to solve a client’s problem, i.e. acquire specific technical skills which the market needs.
The legal industry is evolving very fast - a client frequently approaches a small law firm owner or an independent practitioner for services straddling a combination of practice areas.
For example, advice on a fintech contract may require knowledge of technology laws, banking regulations, data protection, contract drafting, negotiation and dispute resolution altogether.
Similarly, take the example of insolvency and bankruptcy work. For all of 2019, it was one of the most important areas of work for commercial litigators. As of 2020, after the COVID crisis, suddenly, there is a moratorium on filing cases in the NCLT under IBC for insolvency and bankruptcy. However, right now, the work that these lawyers should focus on is the restructuring of loans. There is a lot of work in this area and few lawyers who can do it.
After a year, this could very well change again. Lawyers who do not rapidly respond to the market situation are likely to struggle.
These are just some examples - in reality, client problems pertain to many other practice area combinations.
The challenge for a small law firm owner or an independent practitioner in these situations is to inspire the client’s confidence in his ability to handle such complex work.
The best strategy is to choose a few niches like this (perhaps even just one) and build up a reputation as the ‘go-to lawyer’ for such work.
This kind of work can be very high margin, but several small law firms and independent lawyers fail to get such work. They stick to routine low-margin work, which is often the root of their problems.
You cannot wait to acquire prior experience or have years of expertise in these areas - you have to acquire the competence rapidly through your own resources.
Otherwise, by the time you learn enough about an area of work, it may fall out of favour or may become already too overcrowded to start out, or the trend itself may alter in a way that it makes no sense to focus on it.
Speed and ability to adapt to changes in the market, therefore, is key to the success of the lawyers of the new generation. And this speed and adaptability come from the ability to learn the trade rapidly rather than slowly through trial and error and observation.
The way lawyers used to learn a skill, and practice the same thing over their entire life, looks like a luxury today. Sometimes available, but we need to learn to live without it.
A library of courses in the Master Access program helps you with understanding client objectives and learning about legal services to be delivered.
In the Master Access program, you will have access to a library of all our courses (excluding test preparation courses and dream job Bootcamp) on a variety of practice areas for a period of 4 years from your enrolment. You will also have access to courses that are launched in future as well.
Here is a list of courses that are included. You can click on the relevant course and view its syllabus on a different page:
All master access courses
Courses For Remote International Work
Diploma Programme
Executive Certificate Course (Live Classes)
What we have done for some of our past clients
Nikita Anand
Hasnain Alvi
Individual Practitioner
Harsh Malhotra
Testimonials of our clients
The templates provided in the course material have been very useful. The access has helped in building my practice. It has given me confidence in taking up and guiding my clients
MATEEN QURESHI Advocate, Mumbai
Master Access serves as a primary destination for both research and learning as far as I am concerned. I have also benefited from all the templates you have added based on my specific request.
HASNAIN ALVI Legal Consultant, IB Group
BHUVANA A CIPP/E, Counsel - Data Privacy/Protection, SaaS, Software, Technology Laws, Employment Laws, Legal Content Development
I liked the fact that concepts were explained in very simple language. I can look up a topic with just a few clicks and being sure that I will find the answer I need was really helpful.
ANMOL GUPTA Legal Consultant, Continental Coffee
Do we guarantee any results?
The actual results that you achieve will depend on the effort put in by you to implement the learnings from the program in your practice.
We have deployed pre-determined mechanisms to deliver value to you on the steps mentioned above.
We will also be available to guide you on specific requests that you have if you get stuck while implementing these. Feel free to reach out to us for any additional guidance.
However, the responsibility to implement and use the learning rests ultimately upon you. For example, if you do not reach out to clients or do not publish articles to showcase your work or do not actively learn new skills which are imparted in our courses, you may not get the growth that you want.
You will get some reminder emails and follow up calls from us if we see you are slacking, of course.
What if you don’t benefit from this program? Is there a refund policy?
We have a full refund policy, provided you follow the program diligently for 30 days and then want a refund, anytime between the 30th and 45th day.
If you take the program, follow at least one diploma or executive certificate course diligently for a month, attend all the classes live and perform all the exercises but if you still do not find value in Master Access, or are not able to understand or follow it or not find it good for any reason, we will refund the entire course fee to you.
It is a 100% money-back guarantee with only one condition, you must pursue it properly for a month. If you don’t find it valuable after that, get your entire money back. Refer to our refund policy here.
The most important question
What is the one problem that can’t wait? What do you need to fix immediately?
You cannot wait anymore for growth and getting ahead - whether it means getting new clients, performing high-quality work, earning more, expanding your practice, etc.
If you do not take a new action, you run the risk of staying where you are. You run the risk of stagnation, even as your peers get ahead.
You will need to decide for yourself whether you are willing to shoulder that risk.
If not, are you ready to get professional help?
Your growth and the future of your practice depends on the decision you take now.
To know more about how the Master Access program can specifically help you, schedule a free discovery session here with one of our coaches who have helped thousands of lawyers build successful careers.
Pitfalls to avoid, even if you shut this window and never return
You may not want to proceed any further and close this window. Irrespective of how you proceed, remember that you cannot afford to make the following mistakes:
- Asking prospective clients to give you work first, before you learn skills
- Looking for a highly paid job at a big brand name or a famous law firm first to give you a top-notch experience
- Depending on your senior to teach you everything necessary to build a successful practice
- Thinking that there are no opportunities in your area or in the legal profession
- Believing that clients don’t pay lawyers until they have grey hair
- Limiting yourself to the same practices which your seniors who built a successful law practice a few generations before used
- Thinking that online courses cannot teach any practical skills
If any of these things are preventing you from seriously engaging with the question of whether Master Access can help you, please reach out to us and have a conversation.
Products
- Unlimited access to a library of courses & templates for 4 years, including those which will be launched in future
- Rapid training and personal coaching to develop in-demand new legal skills
- Education that is practical and not just abstract theory - learn how to solve a client’s problem by acquiring specific technical skills which the market needs
- Exclusive training program for growing and managing your law practice
- Opportunity to showcase your knowledge by writing articles and making videos, and placing them on iPleaders blog, LawSikho YouTube channel, Superlawyer. in and associated blogs and channels, thereby getting access to a huge audience which can send you to work.
- Professional networking - participate in our jobs, internships and referral opportunities groups - opportunities are shared by over 6000 and growing alumni every day
- Goal setting and review coaching calls
- Priority customer support
- Priority access to job and recruitment support through our placement office
- You can even request courses, templates and webinars, which we don't already have, and we give these requests a high level of priority
- Priority access to our events
- Access to an exclusive WhatsApp group and Facebook community with other master access students which you can use for networking, referral opportunities and brainstorming ideas
Schedule a free discovery session to know more about how you can build a practice
Course Plan
Above prices are inclusive of all applicable taxes and charges. Option to convert your payment into 2 instalments is available on checkout page.
Master Access
FAQs
Unless specifically mentioned otherwise, none of our courses is recognised, accredited, or validated by any university, government or third party. We consider government regulatory standards as an impediment to offering high-quality courses we offer at an affordable cost, offering informal, non recognised courses rather than collaborating with formal universities.
This course is offered as a skill development course by a private company. LawSikho is India’s leading online legal education provider and provides high-quality legal courses that teach you how to do practical legal work as required by the industry.
For any recruiter or client, what matters the most is whether you possess the relevant skills to match their needs and serve their interests. We will train you in rare and important skills that are highly in-demand and our initiative is one of a kind.
Experts review the syllabus and course content for all the courses. These experts are drawn from law firms and the industry at large. The course is conceptualised, coordinated and marketed by LawSikho, a venture that aims to make justice accessible to people from all walks of life through access to superior legal knowledge.
The legal industry knows and respects our work, and they know that anyone who finished our course and obtained certification has a certain level of knowledge and skills. If nothing else, you will be appreciated for the knowledge and skills you would acquire through our courses and would be able to demonstrate after due completion.
We recommend that you should have completed your Higher Secondary / Class XII from a recognized Board / University. In the case of foreign nationals, you should have completed the equivalent of Higher Secondary in India in your respective country. You should also be comfortable with the English language and using a computer. However, we have no formal pre-qualification requirements because we are not a University or college. Anyone who wants to learn is welcome to join our courses.
Students of LawSikho will be provided hard copy materials within 30 days of your course commencement date. Hard copy of individual courses available on additional payment.
However, online classes, videos, regulatory updates and periodic upgrades to the courses cannot be included in the hard copies. We will provide you with hard copy material for all important chapters. We keep adding many new chapters from time to time and there are restrictions on page numbers so all online material cannot be available in hard copy. We would keep adding new material online from time to time, so please do not expect all such material to be made available in the hard copy also. You can use the hard copy materials for your reference, however, we recommend that you do not exclusively rely on hard copies for cracking the assessment test and the exercises. Please refer to the online library of materials from time to time.
Note: We will send hard copy material through our service partners. We have three service partners.
1. Indian Speed Post (Provides delivery ‘anywhere in India’ under contractual service)
2. Delhivery
3. Trackon Couriers Pvt Limited
If our service partners do not have a presence in your area and want to get the hard copy, you can send us a specific request.
LawSikho will not be responsible if the speed post bounces back or hard copy material is not delivered. We will levy the courier charge on you in such a scenario.
Please visit the respective course page to learn more about the hard copy study material policy of that course.
If international students require hard copy material, they need to share their correct address and we will let them know the cost of the courier which they need to pay and then the hard copy will be dispatched. This is the process because the cost of an international courier is very high compared to the domestic courier within India (for domestic courier we have no additional charges). Some international students provide us with an Indian address for couriering hard copy material. In those cases, we charge nothing extra for the courier.
A person can visit the official website of LawSikho and find the relevant course and see the course syllabus, learning objectives and even a list of weekly exercises. You can also subscribe for free sample material. If more clarification about the course is needed, feel free to chat with our online chat specialist. You could also call us on our landline number, +91 11 40845203 for further assistance.
