A lawyer-turned-entrepreneur, the life of Mr. Anant Gupta has been a roller-coaster ride of new experiences and projects. The NLU Odisha alumni had already been a part of eminent companies and firms before establishing India’s first mooting school- Memo Pundits.
Q. From an associate at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas to developing a trekking-based start-up and finally assisting hundreds of law students with the first Mooting School in India, how did you discover your interests?
A. In my view, the process of discovery of your own skills, talents and interests starts early and is continuous. The journey is not so simple – an important part of this discovery is also time. Time to become self-aware, time to understand what makes you tick, time to decide whether you have the drive and potential to take a risky decision and see it through.
I first thought of quitting my job in June 2017 on a solo trip to Spiti valley in Himachal. I realised that all this money I was making still had me feeling miserable at the end of the day, and that the job would be unsustainable in the long run.
I ruminated upon the idea of leaving my high paying job and focus on my start-ups for a few months, till the ideas started taking concrete shape. I had always had a mind for business and wanted to apply those skills to use. 3 months before I left my job, I started making business plans for my two start-ups – Memo Pundits and Infinite Detours. I started networking with people, figuring out my customer base, their needs, financial sustainability and delivering a valuable product. And I counted on the fact that both these start-ups are rooted in things I am passionate about, and I would be delivering a service/product I truly believe in.
Q. Tell us something more about Memo Pundits. How do you see the start-up growing in the coming years?
A. I co-founded Memo Pundits with Rachnendra Tripathi in 2014, when both of us were in our 3rd year of law school. Around that time, NLUO was on a magical spree of winning Best Memorial awards one after the other. Rachnendra and I were personally involved in helping around 10 moot teams win such awards at even coveted moot court competitions like Jessup (National rounds). We realised that winning a citation at a moot court comes not only at the expense of working hard on your content, it also involves deploying a couple of practical techniques.
There it was – an underlying demand for a potential business. They say necessity is the mother of invention and we were there to test it. While still in our 3rd year of law school, we ran our first pilot project by inviting students of our college to attend a 4-day workshop on Drafting, Editing and Formatting of Moot Court Memorials. In our minds, our target was to receive 20-30 registrations, but to our surprise, we received more than 120 registrations (including our seniors) in less than 24-hours. We happily taught the bunch and received remarkable feedback about our style of teaching (exactly the opposite of boring college lectures). By the end of our 5th year, we had taught about 300 students. We realized one thing, which is our guiding light to this day – our product is creating value to law students.
When Rachnendra and I started working after college, Memo Pundits was dormant for a good 2 years. At the time when I was planning to leave my job at SAM, I thought of restarting the engine of Memo Pundits. This time, we commercialised the course, gave it a professional exterior and started marketing the idea of conducting the course in various colleges throughout India. One-by-one, colleges started saying yes to the course.
By the end of 2019, we had taught some 2,300 students! We have also managed to introduce India’s only Moot Mentorship Program, which makes it possible for moot teams to seek guidance from moot experts from Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and Top NLUs.
As of the latest, we have launched an Online Certificate Course on Memorial Making, which is available at a promotional price of INR 2,490 till May 3, 2020.
Q. What are some nuances of Negotiations that you would like to apprise our readers with?
A. Negotiation is a valuable soft skill which can actually help a person in every aspect of their life. It is not usually taught outside of seminars and a few hours’ worth of practice exercises in some law schools and business schools. To actually build confidence in yourself as a good negotiator, my advice is simple – observe. Observe the behaviour of people around you, learn from day to day activities and interactions. The better you observe, the more you learn.
There is a famous quote that says compromise is the art of cutting a cake in a way that everyone believes they got the biggest piece. I would argue that negotiation is similar. When you are at a negotiating table, you want all parties involved to walk away feeling like they got the best deal. Negotiation also relies on a few smaller sets of skills – identifying real motives of the parties involved, being able to find common interests and goals, building a rapport, and communication skills.
Q. You have done a CORe (Credential of Readiness) program from Harvard Law School. Belonging to the law background, how was the course beneficial for you?
A. The CORe programme is meant to give businessmen an edge in the conduct and growth of their business. Given that one of my businesses was related to law, it wasn’t difficult to connect law and business. I knew I had something to gain from this course because without the proper knowhow, it is not possible to grow a business, unless you are doing salaried work, which was never my aim.
Q. What was your internship experience at PILSARC like?
A. PILSARC was my first internship and I could not have asked for a better introduction to the life of a lawyer. PILSARC works pro bono to provide coordinated institutional support and solutions in the various fields of human rights, civil liberties, governance and social justice. Their office includes a special unit on refugee law, and is an implementing partner of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in New Delhi.
I was blessed to work directly under the tutelage of Mr. Rajeev Dhawan, who is an amazing mentor. It was daunting to work with a lawyer of such eminence and renown, but he takes a genuine interest in the interns working with him, and the work we do there is for a truly rewarding purpose, so that’s an added bonus.
Previous Post: https://desikanoon.in/internship-experience-at-sudhir-shah-and-associates/