Legal education in India is changing, but is NEP 2020 enough to bring real reform?

Legal Education in India is seeing some of the biggest changes it has seen in decades. Students, academics, and policy planners have long lamented the archaic, overly theoretical nature of the legal curriculum, which fails to prepare the graduates for a profession that is rapidly changing. The National Education Policy, 2020 promises correction. Interdisciplinary learning, integration of technology, and better professional preparedness-just what was needed in this journey of reform in legal education.

It is no more a question whether legal education needs to change; rather, it is how fast India can bring in the change and whether NEP 2020 goes far enough to achieve deep structural change.

A Breakaway from Outdated Legal Learning

Indian legal education has traditionally been driven by textbooks, rote learning of case law, lectures, and very limited exposure to the real world of legal practice. The system produced lawyers with sound theoretical backgrounds, though not necessarily possessing the critical thinking, practical skill sets, or tech awareness required by the modern legal profession.

NEP 2020 challenges this legacy. It propels law schools to accept interdisciplinarity in learning, enabling students to supplement core law subjects with other courses such as economics, public policy, sociology, psychology, technology, and international relations. This recognizes something that practicing lawyers of the day already know-that law today interfaces with just about every other sector. From AI-driven decision-making to cybercrimes, from environmental law to global trade disputes, legal practice requires today a multi-dimensional perspective.

India needs to shift its pedagogical approach from a textbook-courtroom model of learning to a holistic model if the country is ever to produce globally competitive lawyers.

Technology Integration: No Longer Optional

Digital transformation brought changes that upset the working of the justice delivery system much faster than the changes in academic curricula. Virtual court hearings, AI-enabled case research, online dispute resolution, digital evidence management, and big-data-driven legal analytics have started becoming integral to modern legal services. However, most of the students passing out of India's law schools have little knowledge of legal technology.

 If Indian legal education is really to be 'future-ready', technology should form an intrinsic part of the core course and not remain an optional course. Similarly, exposure needs to be provided in:

• ·         AI and algorithmic justice systems
• ·         Cyber law and data protection
• ·         Blockchain smart contracts
• ·         Legal analytics and e-discovery
• ·         Digital forensics and tech regulation

The legal profession can no longer afford to treat technology as an optional skillset. The future lawyer is tech-literate, ethically aware, and capable of navigating digital justice ecosystems.

Bar Council Reforms: One Step Forward, but Not Enough

The BCI has initiated a number of reforms in bringing legal education in line with NEP 2020, such as curriculum restructuring, credit-based systems, and reform in the evaluation methods. Though these indicate progress, deep-rooted systemic challenges remain.

 This, in fact, is a growing gap between the top NLUs and most regional law colleges. For example, while students of NLUs have better faculty, exposure to research work, industry networking, and international collaborations, hundreds of small institutions continue to operate with underqualified faculty, outdated libraries, and few internships or moot courts.

Having no strong national mechanism for the creation of parity, the reforms under NEP threaten to give more strength to a two-tier system of legal education, where on one side would be elite institutions and on the other, struggling law colleges.

The Practical Training Deficit

Perhaps the most serious lacuna in Indian legal education is the lack of any structured, supervised practical training. Though internships and moot courts do form part of the requirements, experiences gathered are often unstructured, unmonitored, and unrelated to learning outcomes.

There are some vital professional skills which the young lawyers lack:

• ·         Drafting of legal notices, petitions, and contracts
• ·         Client counseling and negotiation
• ·         Trial technique and litigation strategy
• ·         Legal compliance and corporate advisory
• ·         Policy and research-based legal writing

There is, thus, a felt need for a nationalized internship framework in India, much like residency in medicine or articleship in chartered accountancy, which would assure the uniform quality of in-service training in all institutions.

A Reform Timeline India Must Embrace

From the Advocates Act of 1961 to the establishment of NLUs in the 1990s and finally NEP 2020, every step in legal education in India has been an evolution marked with progress in waves. The 2020s are a window opening for India. If it misses this moment, India will be producing graduates with no aptitude for global legal challenges. The next ten years will require policymaking in implementation, faculty development, and distribution of resources equitably. NEP 2020 has given the blueprint; the outcome is in its implementation. A Decade of Opportunity and Responsibility Legal education in India has at last begun marching towards a future-ready ecosystem. Reform, however, cannot stop with change in structure: India needs an ecosystem of institutions that are inclusive, tech-driven, research-focused, and socially rooted. The legal profession, in years to come, will require not just litigators but also policy experts, mediators, corporate strategists, tech-law specialists, and governance leaders. The transformation has started. What India needs now is speed, accountability, and collective will to convert policy on paper into reform in practice.

About the Author:

Bio: Nibedita is an independent journalist honoured by the Government of India for her contributions to defence journalism.She has been an Accredited Defence Journalist since 2018, certified by the Ministry of Defence, Government of India.  With over 15 years of experience in print and digital media, she has extensively covered rural India, healthcare, education, and women’s issues. Her in-depth reporting has earned her an award from the Government of Goa back to back in 2018 and 2019. Nibedita’s work has been featured in leading national and international publications such as The Jerusalem Post, Down To Earth, Alt News, Sakal Times, and others