THE NEW ART OF JUDGMENT

Strip away the marble halls and the Latin maxims, and law reveals itself as a human pursuit one defined above all by that most elusive of faculties: judgment.

It is also a profession having something of a moment with that idea. The stakes are higher with the pace being faster, the problems far messier. And to top it all AI has made an entrance, capable of doing in seconds some of the work that once occupied junior lawyers for hours.

So what, exactly, is left to judge?

The harder question is no longer simply whether a lawyer can find the answer. It is whether they can recognise the right question, separate for what is at stake and know when the technically correct answer isn’t necessarily the right one.

Three senior lawyers, each approaching the profession from a different vantage point, offer rather different answers. Together, they make a compelling case for something that has always sat at the heart of good lawyering, even if it has never been particularly easy to define.

For Suneeth Katarki, Founding & Senior Partner at CMS INDUSLAW, three decades in Indian corporate and commercial law have led him to a fairly stark conclusion:

“Good judgment has never mattered more, and it has never been harder to define.”

The principles themselves, he says, haven’t changed much. Legal rigour, context, consequences and ethics remain the foundations.

What has changed is the world in which they have to operate. Technology has taken some of the mystique out of legal expertise. Research can be done faster. Drafts can be produced faster. Information that once required experience or at least a very good library is increasingly available at the click of a button.

That makes knowing something less impressive than it used to be. Knowing what to do with it is another matter.

“Excellence is no longer measured by access to information but by discernment and the judgment you make: the capacity to verify, critique, and override,” Katarki says

The last word is the interesting one.

Override.

Because the arrival of AI does not remove the need for judgment. If anything, it puts it under a brighter light. Someone still has to decide whether the answer is right, whether the reasoning holds, what has been missed and whether the result makes sense in the real world.

Katarki sees that responsibility changing as lawyers become more senior.

For the junior associate, judgment may be the courage to say, I don’t know. For the senior partner, it may be the willingness to tell a client something they would rather not hear. For the General Counsel, it is the discipline to remain a trusted internal voice without becoming a captured one.

Different roles. Different pressures. The same underlying demand: discernment.

Sanjeev Kapoor, Senior Partner at Khaitan & Co, takes the argument somewhere more practical.

For him, the question of judgment begins with a simple recognition: lawyers are not practising law in isolation. They are advising businesses, institutions and people whose problems rarely fit neatly inside a legal issue.

“Good judgment, particularly good human judgment, has never been more important to the legal profession than it is today,” Kapoor says.

That may sound counterintuitive in an age of increasingly sophisticated technology. But the more machines can do, the more important it becomes for the human being in the room to understand what the work is actually for.

In commercial matters, that means resisting the instinct to equate legal victory with success.

The most brilliant argument may not be the most useful one. A technically perfect position can damage a relationship. A hard-fought victory can cost more than it is worth. A legal point can be won while capital, reputation or future opportunity is quietly lost.

“A good solution to a legal problem is not necessarily the one validated by a verdict, but the one that preserves relationships, protects capital and safeguards reputation.”

It is a useful corrective to the traditional image of the lawyer as gladiator.

Sometimes the best advice is not here is how we win.

It is here is why we shouldn’t fight this particular battle. That requires more than legal intelligence. Kapoor’s definition of sound judgment brings together critical thinking, reasoning and problem-solving with business acumen, emotional intelligence, a relationship first mindset and reflective practice. Underneath all of it sit the less fashionable, but rather more durable, qualities: integrity, ethics, professionalism, experience and technical knowledge.

And then there is one new requirement. Digital literacy.

The lawyer of the near future will need to understand not only the law, but the tools increasingly being used to find, interpret and produce it.

Anuradha Mukherjee, Partner and Head of Disputes, North India, at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, approaches the question from another direction altogether.

For her, judgment begins with something almost paradoxical: “The highest form of judgment is that which is not judgmental.”

It is an important distinction. We live in a world in which people are constantly being judged on faith, sexuality, belief, background and the countless standards of how one is supposedly meant to behave. Law is not immune to any of this simply because it operates inside courts and statutes.

A sound judgment, Mukherjee argues, must therefore begin with facts. It should be dispassionate, objective and grounded in evidence rather than assumption, instinct or a predisposed state of mind.

The difficulty is that judges are human. They bring their experiences, beliefs and limitations with them, just as everyone else does. Yet the legal system asks them to reach beyond those instincts through the idea of the “reasonable person” an idealised figure who acts with reason and diligence rather than bias.

It is a useful fiction. And perhaps an impossible standard. Mukherjee makes the point particularly well when she talks about landmark judgments. There is a tendency to examine the person behind the decision: their politics, religion, background, worldview.

But the more revealing questions are usually found inside the judgment itself.
How were the facts understood?
Which questions were framed?
How was the law applied?

The ideal, in theory, is almost mathematical: give every relevant fact its due weight, apply the law dispassionately, and the conclusion should follow.

The problem is that law rarely behaves like mathematics. Evidence conflicts. Legal principles overlap. Language is ambiguous. Two interpretations can both appear defensible. This is where experience begins to matter.

And then, somewhere beyond experience, comes something harder to name.

Wisdom.

Experience allows a judge to navigate conflicting evidence within the legal framework. Wisdom allows them to think beyond the immediate result to anticipate what a particular interpretation might mean once it leaves the courtroom and enters the wider world.

The same is true of advocacy. For Mukherjee, one of the clearest signs of a lawyer developing judgment is learning to resist the argument that looks irresistible.

There are arguments that are clever but beside the point. Questions in cross-examination that are tempting but better left alone. Facts that are interesting but will have little bearing on the eventual outcome.

The experienced lawyer learns to edit. That may be one of the least celebrated skills in the profession.

Lawyers are trained to find things: authorities, arguments, inconsistencies, weaknesses, possibilities. Judgment requires them to do something rather different.

To leave things out.

To look through the clutter of a case and identify the issues that will actually matter as the matter moves towards resolution. To anticipate where the dispute is heading and to know which  point deserves to be made and which one, however satisfying, is simply noise.

“This ability is what separates a good lawyer from a wise and experienced lawyer,” Mukherjee says.