Being yourself is revolutionary and Nandini Rao Budhagavi is at that interesting point in a legal career when the old rules are still visible, but the new ones are arriving rather quickly.
She is a lawyer who has wandered into AI, public policy and arbitration, and a poet who seems entirely comfortable with the contradiction. It is perhaps too early to call it a career philosophy, but there is already a pattern: Nandini is less interested in staying neatly inside a profession than in finding out what lies just beyond its edges.
Law was the starting point. What came next was considerably less linear.
There were courtrooms and disputes, environmental and aviation law, questions of policy and governance. Then came legal technology — a world in which the lawyer is suddenly expected to understand not only precedent and principle, but algorithms, product decisions and the peculiar ways in which machines can be extremely confident and completely wrong.
At Lexlegis.ai, where she previously worked, Nandini found herself at that uneasy but fascinating intersection. Her work involved evaluating AI for legal accuracy, thinking about hallucinations, translating legal problems into product requirements and considering what responsible deployment of AI might look like when the subject is law.
It was a curious place to be.
But curiosity seems to be the point.
Away from the law, Nandini writes poetry. Her first collection, Yours in the Becoming, explores selfhood, uncertainty and the rather untidy business of becoming oneself. She plays the Veena and Sitar, and plays competitive lawn tennis.
The combination is slightly unexpected. A lawyer, poet, musician and tennis player sounds less like a LinkedIn profile than the beginning of a good dinner-party conversation.
And perhaps that is where Nandini is most interesting.
She moves between disciplines without feeling particularly obliged to explain why they belong together. Law asks for precision. Music asks for listening. Sport teaches patience. Poetry permits ambiguity. Somewhere between them is a way of looking at the world that is both analytical and deeply curious.
At Clause, Nandini is taking that curiosity into The Registry helping us build an editorial record of the people and institutions shaping India’s legal profession.
The Registry is not about collecting names for the sake of it. It is about looking at the profession closely: who has shaped it, how they have done so, what distinguishes one generation from another, and what the legal landscape tells us about the people within it.
It feels like a natural assignment for someone who is interested in patterns, people and what sits beneath the obvious.
AI may be asking the legal profession what comes next.
Nandini, meanwhile, is helping Clause ask a different question:
Who, exactly, are the people taking it there?