In Conversation with Prof. Anurag Sharma

Prof. Anurag Sharma is an Assistant Professor at K.R. Mangalam University, with experience spanning legal education, research, legal administration and student development. He also serves as the Moot Court Chairperson and Placement Coordinator, where he contributes to strengthening students’ advocacy skills, practical exposure and career opportunities.

His academic and research interests extend to Artificial Intelligence, legal technology, innovative pedagogy and contemporary legal issues. His work includes research on AI-based legal document review, predictive litigation outcome modelling using judicial data analytics, and AI-driven adaptive pedagogical systems for personalised learning. He has also undertaken professional certifications and job simulations in areas including AI, commercial law and innovative legal education.

Prof. Sharma has contributed to research published in Scopus, ABDC and UGC CARE-listed journals, with publications addressing areas such as sustainable development and international environmental law, child protection, good governance, women trafficking and public policy. He also serves as a Reviewer at RSIS International and is an Advisory Board Member at CYBERTALKINDIA.He began his professional journey as a Legal Associate before moving into academia, and has previously served as an Assistant Professor of Law at Oriental University and the Prestige Institute of Management, Gwalior. He holds an LLB from KIIT Law School, an LLM in Constitutional Law and a PhD in Law from Amity University Gwalior.

Your journey has evolved from studying Taxation Law at KIIT to an LL.M. in Constitutional Law, doctoral research, and now teaching and academic leadership. What initially drew you towards legal academia?

My interest in academia did not arrive as a single moment of clarity; it grew out of a discomfort with settling for surface-level answers. Taxation Law taught me the discipline of precision, but it was during my LL.M. in Constitutional Law that I realised how much of law is really about interpreting power, rights and the state's relationship with the citizen, and I found myself more drawn to the 'why' behind a rule than its mechanical application. Doctoral research deepened this further, because it demanded that I sit with uncertainty and build an original argument rather than simply reproduce settled positions. Teaching, in turn, gave that intellectual restlessness a purpose beyond myself, since explaining a concept to a room of first-generation law students forces you to test how well you understand it. Academia, for me, became the space where curiosity, rigour and the desire to shape how the next generation thinks about law could all coexist.

Having spent several years teaching law and working closely with students, how has your understanding of the legal profession changed since you were a law student yourself?

Having mentored several hundred students over the years, and stayed closely involved with placements and career counselling, I now see the legal profession the way a mentor sees a map rather than the way a student sees a single road ahead. Most students, especially early on, imagine a fairly narrow set of destinations, largely shaped by whichever seniors or role models happen to be visible to them, with everything outside litigation or corporate law treated as a fallback rather than a genuine choice. Sitting across the table from recruiters, tracking where our graduates actually land, and guiding students through real career decisions year after year has shown me just how wide this field truly is — from the judiciary and JAG, which offers a disciplined, service-oriented path combining law with the armed forces, to in-house counsel roles that let lawyers work at the heart of business strategy rather than at its periphery.

I now routinely advise students toward paths such as compliance and regulatory affairs, arbitration and ADR practice, legislative drafting and policy research, legal process outsourcing, banking and finance law, intellectual property practice, legal journalism, public interest litigation, civil services, and increasingly legal-tech and academia itself, because each of these draws on a different combination of the same core legal skills. This vantage point has made me far more precise as a mentor, since I can now tell a student not just that alternatives to courtroom litigation and corporate law exist, but exactly which internships, certifications and exposures build credibility for each of these specific tracks. So the change in my perspective is really a change in resolution: from seeing the profession in broad strokes of two or three visible options, to seeing it as a genuinely wide field with dozens of viable, respectable destinations.

You have taken on diverse institutional responsibilities—from programme coordination and placements to mooting, client counselling, criminology and accreditation. How have these roles shaped you beyond your identity as a classroom teacher?

Each of these roles has quietly expanded what I understand teaching to mean. Programme coordination and accreditation work helped me to think like an institution builder, weighing curriculum design, quality benchmarks and long-term academic strategy rather than just a single semester's syllabus.

Placements exposed me directly to what recruiters actually value, which is often quite different from what appears impressive on a student's resume, and that feedback loop has made me a sharper advisor.

Mooting and client counselling kept me close to the applied, almost theatrical side of legal reasoning, where argument construction and client empathy matter as much as doctrine.

Criminology work, meanwhile, pulled me toward the social and behavioural dimensions of law, reminding me that legal rules exist within lived human contexts.

Together, these responsibilities have made me less of a subject specialist and more of someone who understands the ecosystem a law student must navigate.

Many law students assume that becoming a law professor means primarily teaching in the classroom. What does a modern academic career in law actually involve?

Classroom teaching is probably the most visible part of the job, but honestly it is only one strand among several. A modern legal academic is expected to publish consistently in indexed journals, contribute to institutional governance through committees and accreditation cycles, mentor students on research, moots and career choices, and increasingly engage with policy consultations or industry collaborations. There is also a growing expectation to be digitally and technologically literate, whether that means using AI tools responsibly in pedagogy or contributing to legal-tech projects, which many students do not associate with academia at all. Administrative work, from programme design to placement coordination, quietly consumes a significant share of an academic's time, even though it rarely gets discussed publicly. So the honest picture is that of a hybrid professional who is part researcher, part educator, part administrator and increasingly part innovator, and students considering this path should walk in with that fuller picture rather than a purely classroom-centric one.

As someone who has also been involved with placement activities, what are the biggest gaps you observe between what students learn in law school and what employers expect from fresh graduates?

The most consistent gap I see is between theoretical fluency and applied competence; students can often recite the elements of a doctrine but struggle to apply it to a messy, fact-heavy client situation under time pressure. Written communication is another persistent weak spot, since law school assessments reward descriptive answers, while employers want crisp, issue-focused drafting that respects a reader's time. Many students also lack exposure to the commercial or organisational context in which law actually operates, so they understand a contract clause in isolation but not why a business negotiated it that way. There is frequently a comfort gap around technology as well, particularly research databases, document automation tools and now AI-assisted drafting, which employers increasingly assume as baseline literacy. Finally, soft skills such as professional communication, handling ambiguity and taking ownership of a task without constant supervision remain underdeveloped, largely because classroom pedagogy rarely simulates that kind of accountability.

If you had to identify five skills that every law student should develop before graduation—irrespective of whether they choose litigation, corporate law, academia or public policy—what would they be?

First, precise legal writing, because the ability to distil a complex issue into a clear, well-structured argument transfers across every specialisation. Second, issue-spotting and analytical reasoning, which is really the skill of identifying what actually matters in a mass of facts rather than treating every detail as equally important. Third, comfort with technology and research tools, since AI-assisted research, e-discovery platforms and digital case management are no longer optional extras but part of everyday practice. Fourth, negotiation and interpersonal communication, because whether you are counselling a client, arguing before a bench or presenting a policy brief, the ability to read a room and adjust your register matters enormously. Fifth, intellectual adaptability, meaning the willingness to keep learning new domains, because the legal landscape a student enters at graduation will look noticeably different even five years later, and rigid specialisation without adaptability tends to age poorly.

You have been closely involved with moot courts, client counselling and drafting-oriented initiatives. Which practical experiences do you believe make the greatest difference in developing professional confidence?

Moot court, in my experience, does the most to build confidence under pressure, because it compresses the anxiety of public argumentation, quick rebuttal and bench interaction into a controlled, repeatable setting that students can practise until it stops feeling threatening. Client counselling competitions add a different, equally important dimension, teaching students to listen actively and translate a client's anxious, often disorganised narrative into a structured legal problem, which is a skill classroom lectures rarely simulate. Drafting exercises, particularly when tied to realistic fact patterns rather than templated formats, force students to confront ambiguity and make judgment calls, which builds a quieter but very durable form of confidence. What ties all three together is repeated exposure to feedback and correction in a relatively low-stakes environment, so that by the time students face real clients or courts, the discomfort of being evaluated has already been worn down. I consistently see that students who engage seriously with these activities, rather than collecting them superficially, carry themselves differently in interviews and internships.

Students often collect internships, certificates and competition achievements but struggle to translate them into actual employability. How can students turn these experiences into demonstrable professional skills?

The core issue is that students often treat these experiences as items to list rather than material to reflect upon, so an internship becomes a line on a resume instead of a source of concrete, articulable skills. I encourage students to maintain a simple practice of writing, after every internship or competition, exactly what problem they solved, what tools or reasoning they used, and what they would do differently, because this reflection is what later turns into a compelling interview answer. Certificates carry weight only when a student can speak fluently about what they actually learned and applied, not merely display the credential itself. Students should also actively seek feedback from mentors and supervisors during these experiences rather than waiting until the end, since real-time correction accelerates skill development far more than passive participation. Ultimately, employability comes from being able to narrate your experience as a coherent story of growth and applied competence, and that narrative has to be built consciously, not assumed to emerge on its own.

Your publication portfolio spans constitutional law, media trials, environmental law, cybersecurity, privacy, gender-based violence and digital justice. How do you identify research questions at the intersection of law and emerging social issues?

My research questions usually begin not in a library but in something that unsettles me while reading the news or observing a case unfold, whether that is the way media trials compromise the presumption of innocence or how surveillance technology quietly outpaces existing privacy jurisprudence. I then test whether that discomfort reflects a genuine doctrinal or normative gap, by checking whether existing scholarship has already resolved it convincingly, because originality often lies in finding the question no one has framed properly rather than the answer no one has given. Interdisciplinary reading matters enormously here; insights from technology, sociology or criminology frequently reveal legal blind spots that a purely doctrinal lens would miss, particularly in areas like cybersecurity or gender-based violence. I also pay close attention to legislative and judicial developments as they happen, since emerging statutes or landmark judgments often generate a narrow but urgent window in which fresh, timely scholarship can meaningfully influence discourse. In short, the questions come from staying genuinely curious about how law is failing to keep pace with social and technological change, and then having the discipline to interrogate that instinct rigorously.

For a law student who wants to begin publishing research, what distinguishes a genuinely good research paper from one that simply adds another line to a CV?

A genuinely good paper begins with a sharply defined research question rather than a broad topic, because 'AI and law' is a subject, while 'how should liability be apportioned when an AI drafting tool generates an erroneous legal opinion' is an actual research question. It engages critically with existing literature instead of merely summarising it, meaning the student must be able to articulate what gap their argument fills and why that gap matters. Original analysis, even in a modest form such as a fresh doctrinal reading, a comparative angle or a small empirical observation, separates real scholarship from a well-organised literature review. Good papers are also honest about their limitations rather than overstating their conclusions, which paradoxically makes them more credible to serious readers and reviewers. A CV-filler paper, by contrast, is usually written backwards from the goal of publication itself, chasing a trending keyword without asking whether the writer has anything genuinely new to say, and that difference is almost always visible to an experienced reader within the first two pages.

You have participated in training on Scopus/WoS publication, quantitative research, qualitative analysis and research methodology. How important is it for young legal researchers to develop methodological skills beyond traditional doctrinal research?

It is increasingly essential, because doctrinal analysis alone often cannot answer questions that policymakers and courts are now grappling with, such as how a law is actually being implemented on the ground or what social outcomes a particular regulation produces. Quantitative literacy allows a researcher to work meaningfully with datasets, whether that is case disposal statistics, survey data on access to justice, or patterns in cybercrime reporting, which pure doctrinal training does not equip students for. Qualitative methods, such as interviews or content analysis, similarly let researchers capture lived experience and institutional practice in a way that reading judgments alone cannot. Exposure to indexing standards like Scopus and Web of Science also matters practically, since it teaches young researchers the rigour, structure and ethical conventions that international scholarship expects, which improves both the quality and the visibility of their work. Ultimately, a legal researcher fluent in multiple methodologies can ask a wider range of questions and answer them more credibly, which is a genuine competitive advantage as legal scholarship becomes more interdisciplinary.

How can students balance the pressure to publish with the need to ensure that their research has originality, relevance and real-world impact?

The honest answer is that this balance is difficult, and I tell students not to pretend otherwise, because institutional and peer pressure to publish quickly is real and not something they can wish away. What helps is treating publication volume and research quality as separate goals that occasionally align rather than assuming they are the same thing, so a student consciously decides which papers are meant to build foundational skill and which are meant to make a genuine contribution. I encourage students to choose fewer topics but interrogate them more deeply, since a single well-argued, well-researched paper does more for a scholarly profile than several superficial ones. Seeking a mentor's honest feedback before submission, rather than only after rejection, also helps catch weak framing early and saves considerable wasted effort. Ultimately, relevance and impact tend to follow naturally when a student writes about a question they are genuinely curious about and takes the time to understand it properly, rather than reverse-engineering a paper from a submission deadline.

A significant part of your recent research examines AI, smart courts, digital justice, cybersecurity and privacy. What areas of AI and technology law do you believe law students should start exploring today?

Students should pay close attention to AI governance and accountability frameworks, since questions of algorithmic transparency, bias and liability are moving from academic debate into actual regulation across jurisdictions. Data protection and privacy law deserves serious attention too, particularly as India's own data protection framework matures and intersects with global regimes like the GDPR, creating rich comparative and compliance-oriented work. The evolving space of smart courts and digital justice, including e-filing, virtual hearings and AI-assisted case management, is an area where very few practitioners currently have deep expertise, making it a genuine early-mover advantage. Cybersecurity law, especially around critical infrastructure, data breach liability and cross-border cybercrime, is growing rapidly but remains underexplored by most law students. I would also point students toward the emerging field of legal-tech regulation itself, meaning how law should treat AI-generated legal work product, because this question will only become more pressing as such tools become mainstream in practice.

You have also worked on patents involving an AI-based adaptive pedagogical system, predictive litigation outcome modelling and automated legal document review. What does this experience tell us about the opportunities for lawyers to move from merely studying technology to actually building legal-tech solutions?

Working on these patents taught me that the most valuable position in legal-tech is not purely technical or purely legal, but the ability to translate legal reasoning into a structured, testable logic that a system can actually operationalise, and lawyers are uniquely positioned to do that translation. The adaptive pedagogical system showed me how legal training itself can be personalised, adjusting to a student's learning gaps rather than delivering uniform content, which has real implications for legal education at scale. Predictive litigation modelling revealed both the promise and the limits of using historical case data to estimate outcomes, and lawyers who understand the doctrinal nuance behind that data are essential to prevent the models from becoming misleading. Automated legal document review similarly demonstrated that domain expertise is what separates a genuinely useful tool from a superficially impressive one, since knowing which clauses actually carry risk is a legal judgment, not just a pattern-matching exercise. Altogether, this experience convinced me that lawyers should stop viewing themselves only as end-users of legal-tech and start seeing themselves as legitimate co-builders, because the field badly needs people who can bridge legal substance and technical execution.

As AI begins to assist with legal research, drafting, document review and even judicial decision-support, what skills will make a young lawyer valuable when technology can perform many traditional legal tasks?

The skills that will matter most are precisely the ones that AI struggles to replicate reliably, beginning with judgment, meaning the ability to weigh competing interests, context and consequences in a way that goes beyond pattern recognition. Ethical reasoning and accountability will become more, not less, important, because someone has to remain responsible for verifying, contextualising and standing behind AI-assisted output, and that responsibility cannot be automated away. Strong client relationship skills, including empathy, negotiation and the ability to explain complex outcomes in accessible language, will continue to differentiate lawyers who add genuine value from those who merely process information. A young lawyer who understands how to critically evaluate AI outputs, catching errors, biases or unsupported assumptions, will be far more valuable than one who either resists the technology entirely or trusts it uncritically. Ultimately, the lawyers who thrive will be those who treat AI as a highly capable junior assistant that still requires supervision, judgment and ethical oversight, rather than as a replacement for their own thinking.

Do you think law schools are currently doing enough to prepare students for an AI-driven legal profession? If not, what should legal education change?

Honestly, most law schools are still catching up, and the gap between how quickly AI tools are being adopted in practice and how slowly curricula are being revised remains significant. A large part of legal education continues to emphasise memorisation and doctrinal recall, when what students will actually need is the ability to critically evaluate AI-generated research, drafting and analysis, which is a fundamentally different skill. I believe law schools need to integrate practical, hands-on exposure to legal-tech tools directly into courses rather than treating technology as a standalone elective that only interested students opt into. Faculty development is equally important, because instructors themselves often need training to teach these tools credibly, and institutions should invest in that as seriously as they invest in student-facing initiatives. Curriculum reform should also make space for interdisciplinary learning, drawing in basic concepts from data science and ethics, so that graduates leave law school not just aware of AI but genuinely capable of working alongside it responsibly.

You have judged several national and international moot court competitions and have also conducted sessions on memorial preparation and mooting. From a judge's perspective, what separates an average mooter from an exceptional one?

An average mooter tends to rely on memorised submissions and struggles the moment a bench question deviates from the script, while an exceptional mooter treats the memorial as a foundation for reasoning rather than a text to recite. What genuinely distinguishes strong mooters is their composure under pressure, their ability to concede a weak point gracefully while redirecting the bench toward their stronger arguments, rather than defending every position rigidly. Exceptional mooters also demonstrate a real command of the factual matrix, using facts strategically to support legal propositions instead of treating law and facts as separate silos. Their command of language matters too, but not in a theatrical sense; the best mooters are precise and economical, saying exactly what is needed to answer the bench's concern rather than filling time with rehearsed rhetoric. Ultimately, what separates the two is genuine understanding versus performance, and a good judge can almost always tell within the first few questions whether a mooter is thinking or simply reciting.

Beyond mooting, how valuable are activities such as client counselling, MUNs, research, debates and drafting competitions in developing the communication and analytical abilities that lawyers actually need?

I often tell students that mooting gets disproportionate attention simply because it is the most visible and most rewarded activity in law school, but the honest truth is that a well-rounded lawyer is built through a combination of experiences, each sharpening a different muscle. Client counselling teaches something mooting never can, which is how to sit with a client's uncertainty and emotion and still extract the facts needed to construct sound legal advice, a skill that matters just as much in a courtroom as it does in a boardroom. MUNs build a different kind of composure, the ability to negotiate, build coalitions and represent a position convincingly even when it isn't your own, which turns out to be remarkably close to what happens in arbitration and settlement discussions. Research competitions and debates cultivate patience and structured thinking respectively, the former rewarding depth and the latter rewarding speed, and a lawyer genuinely needs both depending on whether they are drafting an opinion or responding to a bench in real time. Drafting competitions, meanwhile, quietly teach the discipline that most other activities skip, precision, because a single ambiguous clause can carry consequences no amount of eloquence can undo later. My honest advice to students is to resist the temptation to over-invest in mooting alone, because it is this combination of experiences, not any single one, that actually produces the analytical range and communication versatility the profession demands.

Looking at the legal profession over the next five to ten years, which emerging areas—AI, cybersecurity, digital privacy, environmental law, ADR, legal technology or others—do you believe will create the greatest opportunities for young lawyers?

I expect AI governance and legal-tech regulation to grow the fastest, simply because every sector adopting AI will need lawyers who understand both the technology and the accompanying compliance and liability questions. Digital privacy and cybersecurity law will remain closely linked areas of high demand, particularly as data protection enforcement matures and cross-border data flows create increasingly complex regulatory challenges. Environmental law, especially around climate litigation, ESG compliance and corporate accountability, is likely to expand significantly as both regulators and investors demand stronger accountability frameworks. ADR, particularly institutional arbitration and online dispute resolution, will continue growing as courts remain overburdened and businesses seek faster, more predictable resolution mechanisms.

My honest view is that the greatest opportunities will actually lie at the intersections of these fields, for instance a lawyer who understands both environmental regulation and technology-enabled compliance monitoring, because specialists who can bridge two domains will be considerably rarer and more valuable than single-domain experts.

Finally, if you could speak directly to a law student who wants to build a successful career but feels overwhelmed by academics, internships, competitions, research and the constantly changing legal industry, what would you tell them to focus on first?

I would tell them, first and most importantly, to stop trying to do everything at once, because that overwhelm is often less about capability and more about the mistaken belief that every opportunity must be pursued simultaneously. Instead, I would encourage them to build depth in one or two genuine strengths, whether that is writing, advocacy or research, and let that strength anchor their choices, because a focused, well-developed skill opens more doors than a scattered list of average ones. I would also remind them that consistency matters far more than intensity, and that steady, sustainable effort across a semester will outperform frantic bursts of activity before deadlines. They should seek honest mentorship rather than relying solely on peer comparison, since peers are usually navigating the same uncertainty and are not always the most reliable benchmark. And finally, I would tell them that the legal industry will keep changing regardless of how prepared they feel, so the most valuable thing they can build is not a perfect resume but the underlying habit of learning continuously, because that habit is what will carry them through every shift the profession undergoes.