Announcing SpicyIP TV! The SS Edition: Episode 1 with Mr Murali Neelakantan
SpicyIP
A few months ago, in the green environs of the inaugural edition of the SpicyIP Summer School (held at the lovely campus of ECC, Whitefield, Bengaluru) , we had the golden chance to sit and engage with so many interesting, and interested, minds. As course-participants took the opportunity to sit back with many of the faculty and engage in hours of discussion about careers, life, law and more, we too took the opportunity to kickstart something we've been wanting to do for a while - our very own podcast! And yes, with the array of experienced superstars present there, it would've been silly not to! The only problem? None of us had done anything of the sort, ever before. After all, how hard could it be? Turns out - it is no cakewalk! All kudos to all those content creators and podcast hosts who do it all on their own! So, we googled and youtubed and made phone calls and figured out a camera and mic setup. We had the super enterprising Sonisha Srinivasan, a final year student of law at Christ University, volunteering to host it and the whole team helping out behind the scenes to get things done and are now excited to officially launch SpicyIP TV! As luck would have it, we were able to get some conversations recorded with nearly all the faculty and guest speakers who came in - but unfortunately, not all - as some had to rush immediately after their sessions. Luckily, we have no time limit and look forward to being able to get some of their time again some time in the future for future podcasts!
After exactly twenty years of blogging (!!), its a huge moment for SpicyIP to be opening out to another form of content as well! We're still figuring it out but we can promise you that we'll be bringing in some very interesting content - regular chats with bloggers, guest experts, and more! We're starting with video content that will go out on Youtube, and will shortly get the corresponding audio-only versions out on the various podcast services as well. We actually meant to get this particular series out much sooner, however we struggled to find help with the post-production editing work, especially as that included handling the various unfocused cameras and dropped audios (like I said, we were all first timers!). Finally, Sonisha and I finally sat and step by step learnt how to edit through hours of youtube tutorials - a slow but super interesting process. We'll continue to learn more as we go along and hopefully improve on the recording and editing front - but most importantly for now, we are very excited to finally be able to get this out with this star set of speakers! So a huge thanks to our speakers, and to all the people involved at various stages in putting together this first set of podcast interviews - Sonisha, Praharsh, Yogesh, Md Sabeeh, Bharathwaj, Tanishka, Athreya, Anjali, Gaurangi, Kartik & Mayank!
SpicyIP TV: The Summer School Edition - 01 Murali Neelakantan on A Career in Law, and Legal Education
For our opening episode, Sonisha sat down with longtime friend of the blog and multi-domain legal expert, Mr Murali Neelakantan. Murali played a key role in getting the inaugural edition of the Summer School to turn out as well as it did, and looking back, we could've benefited from simply recording so many hours of the post-class discussions that he engaged with the students in as well. Nonetheless, it was great to have this session with his quick thoughts on his life in law, as well as his sharp insights on the state of legal education today! Without further ado, here's the first episode! (Please note, the audio feed glitched and cut somewhere just after the halfway point. We've tried to restore it as best we can. Nonetheless, in case you have any trouble following along, the subtitles as well as the transcription below are also present).
In this episode (01), Sonisha Srinivasan speaks to Mr Murali Neelakantan (bio below) about his career journey and his perspective on legal education in India.. He explains how moving to Cipla changed his views on healthcare access and affordability and set him on his path for the last 12 years. He also highlights the critical need for Indian legal education to move beyond rote learning, and to encourage deep, critical engagement with real world issues, connecting legal education to societal challenges as well as the ability to question and understand better.
About Murali Neelakantan: Murali Neelakantan is the Principal Lawyer at Amicus, a dual-qualified lawyer (English solicitor and Indian advocate), who brings extensive experience from roles as Global General Counsel at Cipla and Senior Partner at Khaitan & Co. Previously, he served as a Partner at Arnold & Porter and Ashurst in London. He has held Board positions at Glenmark Pharmaceuticals and TTK Prestige Ltd. A prolific writer, he has penned incisive op-eds on healthcare for BloombergQuint, NDTV Profit, The Hindu, The Wire, Indian Express, Moneycontrol, and Scroll. A 1996 graduate of the NLSIU, Bangalore, he co-edited “An Idea of a Law School- Ideas from The Law School” and published in NLSIR, NLSBLR, Indian Public Policy Review, and The Lancet Regional Health – South East Asia. Recognized as an expert, he has been featured in the Financial Times, British Medical Journal, and podcasts like “The Firm, ” “Shortcast over Coffee,” and “The Seen and The Unseen.
SS: We have a couple of questions for you today sir. Could you take us through your journey of being in the pharmaceutical industry and what inspired you to come in here?
MN: I think it happened quite by chance. I had been a lawyer for many years in the UK and in India. And in about early 2013, Cipla became a client and I started spending a lot of time in the Cipla offices, advising the senior management. And as time passed by about September, they decided that I was spending more time there than in my own office in the law firm. So, they suggested that I should join the company. At that time, it wasn't very clear what role I would play there. So, they created a new post called the Global General Counsel in the CEO's office.
So, for me, the excitement was it's a new role. I had never done something like this. I don't think many lawyers in India had done it before. So, it is just the excitement of doing something different. Also, I'd been a lawyer for a very long time. There's only that many commercial transactions that will excite anyone after a period of time. So, it seemed like a good thing to do. And I like the idea of being involved in the business. I've always been that kind of a lawyer. So, that's how it happened that in October 2013, I moved to Cipla. And didn't have to deal with agreements every day. I didn't have to deal with documents every day. It was largely a role of advising senior management. And that seemed very, very exciting. I learnt a lot about the business. And once I enjoyed that work, it took over my life for the last 12 years. So, I continued to write about the healthcare industry, healthcare issues.
It was an exciting time in India as well. There are lots of issues. And there isn't very much writing on healthcare, academically and professionally. So, I found a very nice way of writing, not just op-eds but also academic articles and journals. And that continues to be what I do these days - I'm self-funded researcher in healthcare.
SS: That's great. So, also with respect to Cipla, how did being in Cipla shape your perspectives about the industry and how did your opinions change or stay the same or how do you bring about that, specifically with things like generics? And how did you basically, how did Cipla shape your opinions on various things in the industry?
MN: I think everybody who's being at Cipla will say that it changed their lives. It's the philosophy of Cipla. It's what they strongly believe in. And that remains irrespective of whether you're still in the organization or not. I didn't have a very long stint there. But the fact that we were able to see how access to healthcare did not exist, what the barriers were for access to healthcare, just an understanding that people deserve universal healthcare, these were ideas that I hadn't thought about before I went to Cipla.
Also, I think for a lot of us, we don't engage with these issues because they're not real for us. But everyone in Cipla is very engaged with this issue. So it doesn't matter that you have great drugs, what matters really is can every patient get it. And therefore, how can we make it happen? If you start from there, that is a life-changing experience for everyone, not just in India, but all over the world. So access to medicines, access to healthcare really took over my life for the last 12 years. So to me, that was the big change.
In the past, I thought, okay, there are medicines, there are patients, we buy medicines, we all get cured. We didn't really think, I think a lot of us still don't, think very carefully about are these affordable, can we make them affordable? Can we give them access to it? What are the government policies that prevent access to medicines? What are the well-meaning government policies that deny people access to drugs? Those higher-level questions, I think, I hadn't thought of earlier. And that's being mostly what I think about now. So in that sense, it changed my life, and I'm sure, I know this from experience of speaking to colleagues, former colleagues at Cipla, that that's a really big thing.
Also, the whole world of activism outside what you see in Cipla society, in the healthcare sector is very specific. They are well-researched, they have exceptional capability and expertise in healthcare. So there is really a group of really sharp, intelligent, hardworking activists who do an exceptional job of advocacy in access to healthcare. I hadn't seen that world at all. We see activism on the streets, we see activism politically, we see activism, let's say, for human rights in a sense, but not so much in healthcare. So that world, I was not exposed to it. And that shook me. And those people have been fighting battles for decades, relentlessly. Many of them get up and do this every day, even when they know that the impact is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Many have gone for decades without being sure that they've had an impact and yet continue to do it. So seeing those kind of people who are dedicated to this, who live very ordinary lives outside, but do extraordinary work to me, that was a revelation.
SS: Right. And I think this experience of yours also takes me to the session that we had in the SpicyIP Summer School, where certain questions that you post made me think a lot. A lot of things, even the basic question, that you asked about is patent necessary for innovation or do we really need I.P.R. And everything that went back into accessibility and things like that. In the Indian law schools today and in the legal education ecosystem in India, what do you think is missing in which would help students become better lawyers, had them think better and come out in the industry and think about things like innovation, accessibility and what is that gap that you feel needs to be filled or would be good if it is filled?
MN: I think fundamentally Indian legal education is focused on producing lawyers. It means they are trying to, I am not saying successfully, but they are trying to produce lawyers who can do basic tasks. Unfortunately, if you ask the practitioners, they think that the lawyers that are being produced are incapable of even doing those tasks. So even at that level, the criticism of law schools and law colleges is that they are not even producing law graduates who are affected to start in the profession successfully. That is the first question. So even that major objective with the law schools have are producing good lawyers. There is a lot of difficulty in accepting that as being accomplished. Elsewhere in the world, we expect that lawyers will ask some refinamental questions while studying the subject. Maybe we need to go back to that in the law schools here. So in the curricula, the question I asked is, is there a need for patterns to exist? You can only answer that question if you go back and understand why we have a system of patterns from a long time ago, how it changed over time and what it has become today? And we have to ask the question, is that fit for the world we live in today? What is the damage it does to society in the way it's set up?
Those are fundamental questions and I don't think those questions are being asked in law schools. So without understanding the history of patterned law or trademark law or copyright law, why it was good for the time that existed? What has changed? And therefore, how do we need to reimagine it? Those are questions that are not being asked. And to me, you can't understand a subject if you don't think of it in this way. If you can't think of it as why it exists today? Why it originally came into being? And whether or not it's appropriate every day. If you can't ask those three questions, then you haven't really studied the law very much. Knowing section number, knowing the forms and drawing the rules is not an understanding of the law. So that level of understanding I think is what is missing. And we saw this thing yesterday's session and today's session. These are fundamental questions. And they are unable to even give me the answers that are there in textbooks today. So in that sense, I think there is a challenge with legal education being almost like a vocational course. They're able to complete tasks. Some would say not well, but at least that's what they're being prep for. But they're not prep for asking important questions. You know, prep for asking questions about the relevance of many of these things in today's world. And being able to imagine how it can be relevant. How it can be changed. How do you engage with activists for example? How do you engage in the different point of view?
SS: Right
MN: That startles them. Whereas in every other field, it is expected. So in the medical profession, you'll always ask what if asked for an opposite view point. What other possibilities exist? That we don't seem to be asking. We just seeing what is there and accepting what is there. That doesn't help with the deep understanding of the subject. And acceptance doesn't help with the deep understanding of the subject. So I think that would be a fundamental change in which law is taught to law students. So understanding what it is, how it came to exist, the impact it has on society. We're not seeing that at all.
We're leaving it to the activists to tell us what the impact on society is. And many students will never get access to any of this thinking. The activists thinking. No school should encourage more of that. And that comes where the faculty being open to it. The faculty inviting activists professionals, practitioners, thinkers, jurists to come and engage with the students. And encouraging the students to engage with them in an open way. That's the other challenge. The students don't think they need to engage. They think they need to read and reproduce rather than engage the subject. So if we change the way, we think of subjects in law school and we think of what we want to equip the students. Then I think there will be more useful to not just their clients but society tend to be.
The second I find is they are very, very comfortable with words but not with numbers. And to me that's very worrying because a lawyer today can't be adequate in the performance of their duties. They don't understand numbers. And law school is just to focus on data statistics, data sciences, any of that. I have written a whole syllabus for how to teach data science to law students. But unfortunately, nobody's called me to say they want to teach that in law school. And I think in the first year of law school where the teacher legal method, one of the very important aspects is legal method involves data. So you think you understand very basic terms like beyond reasonable doubt. But what is beyond reasonable doubt? 99.9% is beyond reasonable doubt. 75% is beyond reasonable doubt. 68% is preponderance of probability. If you ask statisticians, probabilities, a number is 50% probable. 52% probable. 53% probable. So we are hanging people on the basis of the on reasonable doubt. But we are not able to say does this event occur 73% to the times. or 78% to the times are 80% to the times. And does it matter? So even the words that we use in the Evidence Act, we're not able to clearly say, what it means. So we all have a subjective muddled view of what is probable. What is reasonable? Without actually seeing the data, does this event occur every day? Does it occur many times in a day. Is it likely it could've occured on that day? We don't ask these questions. We're working from instinct and personal experience rather than what the law says which is probability. So even the definition of fact in the Evidence Act is probable and likely. And yet nobody asks the question what is probable? How do we deal with probable? So, very basic words that we're using, we're giving them or attributing to them meaning that is not substantiated by data.
So to me, if we get a good foundation when we teach them how to deal with data and use more data in the analysis, in the arguments, the submissions to court, then we're more likely to get robust results. Those are two things I think, I would hope that law schools take up and change.
SS: Those are great insights. Especially when you said that data science and law - that's not something which everybody would think of, or not something which we hear a lot, often, and you having designed a course for that, that's really great. And also I think another thing that you said about how things should start from the classroom, I think that is also on the students, right? Like even when the students think and talk, the classroom is the safe space for them to start off anything, so..
MN: True, but I think it will only start if the teachers have that attitude - so you can't expect the students who just come out of high school to have this awareness it's really incumbent on the teachers to build this little safe space where these fundamental questions can be asked. They encourage these questions to be asked, present different viewpoints
I find in most law schools the law teachers are least interested in the law. So if the teachers are not interested in the law it's very difficult to get students interested in something. So I find even when I go into guest lectures nobody from the faculty turns up. They may call experts in, very few do, but when they do the faculty doesn't turn up and want to learn. How often is the faculty engaging in the real world? So in my case how often are they speaking to people in the pharma sector, in any sector to understand - how does the law work there - so I can teach it better? How can I teach it in a way that is easy for students to understand?
If i I can relate to something that's happening around me, it's easier for me to understand. So can we make it contextual to what is happening around us. Can we deal with the issues that are in the newspapers and the TV every day and find how law is in that system, then students will be able to understand. So if you're teaching access to healthcare, then we should be asking the question in IP - What happened during the pandemic? Why didn't everybody get vaccines? Why did some get vaccines and some not? Has patent anything to do with it? Is it international relationships between nations that has something to do with it? Then you will understand WTO - you will understand TRIPS - you'll understand Doha and then you ask very basic questions. So in a way, if you just have to take the example of the pandemic - take the example of what's happening around us, you should be able to contextualize a lot of this. Then the students will understand and more importantly will not forget. If they are reading sections they're reading case law - they don't relate to any of that. I mean kids don't care whether somebody is dying of high blood pressure or diabetes, they don't relate to it. But several of them will have asthmatic friends, family members, so rather than take an example of something that's happened in court long time ago, this is the question you can ask and these are the examples that you can give for them to relate to trademarks or patents or any of these things - trade secrets, manufacturing, compulsory licensing.
The things that are around them - with an inhaler if they're using it , some of them may see their parents being diabetic, so insulin is an example. Those examples are relateable and you can have a whole IP course based on one or two of these examples, which they're relating to each other, to students. So maybe law teachers need to think of how they teach each of these things differently and we can find products that incorporate many of these features. So you can find a product that has patents, you can find a product that has generics, you can find a product that has trademark issues, that has copyright issues so that requires, so that requires, teachers to invest a little time to make these case studies and give it out to students and discuss those in class. They will remember law much more with these examples than memorizing sections or memorizing case law. You can find those much more easily now than it could in our time.. so memory may have been useful 30 years ago, today understanding insights are more important. We can find information with a kindle which we couldn't do then but we're still using the same pedagogy that we had then - which is memorizing so that we can access information so rather than work on insights and understanding. So that would be my recommendation - that can we work on better pedagogy by teachers interested in the real world ,engaging with the real world, rather than teaching it just in a classroom and then going over it.
There have been instances in the past where I've said that in the United States law professors file amicus briefs in the Supreme Court on important issues where they present the Court with alternate view points, explain to the court the consequences of this decision - if you decide X this is what's going to happen; if you decide Y this is going to happen. Therefore when the Supreme Court comes out with the decision it contemplates the future events. Whereas in India the Supreme Court is sometimes no better than a munsif [court, if] it just answers the question and decides a dispute, it doesn't think about laying down the law, declaring the law, understand the consequences of what come out of this declaration of law. So again law professors law teachers have a great role to play in creating a future for the law, in a way that we understand it better. So those are the roles if law teachers play they will be more relevant to the students and students should be much more prepared to face challenges in the future not just looking back on caselaw.
SS: And that will also help in bridging the gap between what we study in law school when when they come into the practice because I think that is also something which a lot of students struggle with what they learn in law schools and then after they graduate they end up in something which nobody taught them about or something even maybe firms don't uh ask them to do. So I think this would also help in bridging that gap and bringing up students who actually understand the industry in a better way.
MN: Maybe not so much as understanding the industry but being equipped to ask questions so they will understand the task better. Maybe they have never done the task before, so you suddenly ask someone to write a trademark opposition. Law school doesn't teach you to write trademark oppositions - that's a specialized skill but at least they will know what an opposition is and they will have thought of it in class. And you can find examples now on the net so it's not a big deal like before - [where] you [had] to memorize what goes in an opposition. You can find a rule once and then you can learn to do it - but thinking about asking the questions, understanding the fundamental concept is really more important than knowing the rule under which an opposition is filed. So I think students find that they are lost on both fronts - they are not being taught the procedural stuff that is basic skills to do the tasks in law firms but they also haven't about the question think about the task so they are really lost because they have neither of these two skills.
SS: So critical thinking is one of the most important things...
MN: I don't know whether you can call that critical thinking but it's just uh the ability to have … to bring to bear the thinking that's been done in class so we were told that lawyers are different because we think differently I'm not seeing a lot of that I think I find that most people seem to think alike. There's no difference between somebody who's studying law somebody who hasn't studied law on several of these issues which means that lawyers coming from law schools aren't thinking different so even though that is the objective, there is a legal way of making lawyers think differently. We're told all this but I'm not really seeing it so law schools not meeting its own objectives.
SS: Thank you sir, I think these were like some great sets of insights like I learned a lot from these and I'm sure people will also like listen to this and get a lot of insights and start thinking about different ways of doing things. Thank you so much for being here today, it was an honour talking to you ,thank you