Abhinav Somani

The through-line

Almost everything he says comes back to a single claim: the exam is not a knowledge test, it is a comprehension and composure test, and most candidates lose marks to fear rather than to ignorance. He describes CLAT as "glorified reading comprehension" [1] and argues that once you strip the section labels off the paper, the supposed hard parts dissolve: "When you remove the labels, there's no difference between the two sections" [2]. From that follows his whole method, which is less about volume of material than about attitude, consistency and self-management. Preparation, in his accounting, is only half the result; the other half is the two hours in the hall, and no amount of work survives a candidate who panics on the day [1].

The second thread is a comfort with not having a plan. He came to law without a lawyer in the family, without a settled idea of what the degree is for, and has stayed deliberately undecided since, treating both the subject and the career as things to be sampled before being chosen [1][2].

On choosing law without a map

Law was not his idea. He comes from a family of doctors, and by class 10 he had concluded only what he did not want: "science is just not for me" [2]. What he did have was a pull towards history, political science, economics and literature [1][2]. His father's suggestion was pragmatic rather than visionary, that a law degree carries a substantial BA component so he could study the subjects that interested him while also holding a professional qualification, and that he could quit within a month if he disliked it [2]. Interest arrived through the material itself, through the basic contracts and torts encountered in preparation, and he reports that since entering law school he has come to like the law subjects more than the BA ones [2].

He is candid that being a first-generation lawyer means no familial guidance about what comes after the degree, and that his prior picture of the profession was assembled from television, from Harvey Specter and a vague sense that corporate life looked glamorous [2]. That picture did not survive contact with the institution, which he says presents so many options that any preconceived notion "gets thrown out of the window" [2]. His stated approach is therefore to experiment, take a variety of internships, consult seniors and teachers, and decide afterwards, keeping academia, litigation, corporate work, immediate employment and study abroad all open [1][2]. On the entrance itself his ambition was narrower: National Law School Bangalore was always the aim, with Hyderabad, Kolkata and NLU Delhi as outcomes he would have accepted [1].

On everything being reading comprehension

His central technical argument is that critical reasoning, reading comprehension and legal reasoning are the same activity under different names, and that candidates frighten themselves with the vocabulary: hearing "critical reasoning" produces panic that the underlying task never justifies [2]. What actually matters is conceptual clarity about the terms of argument, understanding what an inference is, what a premise is, what a conclusion is, what an argument is, on the grounds that a question you cannot parse is a question you cannot answer [1]. For legal reasoning he makes the same point with a worked example: an early attempt at a 2021 passage on consideration in contract took him ten to fifteen minutes because he had to work out what consideration even was, while the same passage late in preparation could be skimmed and answered directly [2]. The conclusion he draws is bounded, that basic familiarity with legal terminology pays off but should not be overdone, because the law is what you go to college to learn [2].

On not being scared of a section, especially maths

He is emphatic that fear is the real handicap: "the moment you are scared of it you've closed your mind to it," after which no amount of effort will produce a good performance in that section [1]. Maths is his standing example and his own case. He was fine with arithmetic as a child, lost interest when algebra and the more advanced material arrived, and seriously considered abandoning quantitative techniques on the reasoning that he could settle for eighty-five percent of the paper [1]. What changed his mind was noticing that the maths being tested is not the maths he feared, only ratio, proportion, percentages and similar basics, and that his own strength in fast mental arithmetic was exactly the skill required [1][2]. He now says he has come to like numbers [1].

His advice to anyone still tempted to skip the section is arithmetical rather than moral. Blind-guessing a single option across ten questions costs nothing under the marking he describes, and in practice one of the four options is usually easy to eliminate, which is within the reach of anyone who has passed class 10; after that, "the probability is in your favor" [2]. The stake, as he frames it, is that a single mark can be the difference between getting into NLS and not, and that is not a thing to have regrets about [2].

On mocks, and what practice is actually for

His own mock schedule escalated deliberately: one a week when mocks began, then two, and in the final couple of months upwards of five or six a week taken together with his study group [1]. Two habits sit alongside the volume. First, always finish inside a self-imposed deadline, one hour fifty-five minutes rather than two hours, so that on the real day there is a five-minute buffer for a section that runs long or for filling in the OMR [1]. Second, analyse them, a discipline he admits to having broken exactly once, when he scored 39 on a mock some fifteen or sixteen mocks into his preparation and laughed instead of reviewing it, which he identifies as precisely the paper he should have analysed most carefully [1].

He also draws a sharp line between mock reading and academic reading, warning first-years who ask him about it that the skills transfer only partially. A fifty-page mock read in two hours is read to be finished; a thirty-page reading for class has to be read to be understood, for the principle of law being laid down or the argument being made, and the two are not the same exercise [2]. Underneath all of it sits his general rule against churn: pick a strategy and be consistent with it rather than switching approach and GK sources week to week [1].

On general knowledge and the FOMO problem

GK is the one section he says he dreaded, despite genuinely enjoying reading The Hindu and The Indian Express daily [2]. His diagnosis of why it goes wrong for people is social rather than intellectual. He watched a friend, now a classmate with a strong rank, work through fifteen separate GK sources, and the sight of it made him doubt his own three [2]. His answer is to reason about who actually sets the paper: a professor at an NLU who will not be trawling fifteen sources but will pick up a newspaper and set questions on whatever interests them, so "you're not preparing for UPSC you're preparing for clat" [2]. The prescription follows: three sources, four at most, and then "pick three sources, but then do them religiously," to the point of being able to answer anything from within them, which he argues delivers more mental satisfaction than fifteen sources skimmed [2].

The other half of the GK advice is timing, and here he cites his own near-miss. He began revising GK on a Tuesday for an exam the following Sunday and considers himself lucky the paper was easy, because it could have been disastrous [1]. Candidates consistently underestimate the volume, he says, and only discover how much there is when they finally start [1].

On nerves, overconfidence and the day itself

He treats the exam day as half the result, and the half most under-managed [1]. His own anxiety was real and arrived on schedule, mild early on and sharpening from December as the calendar made the deadline concrete, taking the familiar form of counting other candidates and comparing yourself downward [1]. The remedies he offers are modest and physical: music, talking to friends, and above all a nap, which he says settles things [1]. The reframe he used in the hall was to convert the crowd into a non-factor, reasoning that everyone present is equally panicked, so it confers no disadvantage, and that if you have prepared well and intend to give your best, worrying adds nothing [1]. He also notes that composure has tactical value, since a candidate who panics at an unexpected paper cannot switch to an alternative strategy, while a calm one can [1]. His formulation for D-day accepts in advance that nobody feels they have done enough: tell yourself "I did the best I could now let me do the best with what I have what I have done" [2].

The mirror-image danger is overconfidence, and here he uses himself as the cautionary tale. After scoring very well on the Consortium's second sample paper he concluded there was no need to slog as before, and his marks then fell for a month with nothing he tried able to reverse the trend [1]. The balance he recommends is to be pleased by a good mock without letting it change your effort, and to "be critical of yourself where you need to and pat yourself on the back where you need to" [1].

On keeping a life while preparing

He rejects the total-immersion model on the grounds that it distorts judgement: when mocks, analysis and GK fill the entire day, the exam becomes the only thing in the world, so one bad paper reads as total failure [2]. His own counterweight was a daily walk with his dog after the afternoon mock, which he kept even when family pointed out that the twenty minutes accumulated to hours across a week and could be delegated [2]. His reasoning is explicitly a trade of objective efficiency for subjective functioning: it is something he values as a person, and keeping it made the studying work better [2]. He applies the same test to the broader question of sacrifice. Objectively, missing a birthday party to gain five years at a great university is worth it; subjectively it depends on whose party it is, because missing a best friend's birthday may cost more focus than the saved hours are worth, and each candidate has to make that call [2]. He did deactivate social media as the exam approached [2]. He also kept his options deliberately unresolved, with no plan B beyond the December exams and a stated willingness to cross that bridge after the boards if it came to it [2].

On what law school is actually like

His account of NLS is affectionate and unromantic. First-years arrive with enormous energy, first time away from home with nobody telling them to sleep, and they attend every talk and event because they do not want to miss anything; by third year, having seen most of it, that energy has settled into calm and something close to apathy about the two or three talks a week on campus [2]. He describes learning to relax after a school career of being the extremely studious student, and counts exploring Bangalore, outstation trips and staying up until two in the morning talking to a friend as part of the point of college [2]. On extracurricular culture he acknowledges the observation that law school life narrows to moot courts and debates, and that other cultures exist only in pockets [1].

Competition, he argues, does not end with the entrance, it changes texture. In CLAT the pressure comes from sheer numbers, one lakh unseen competitors; in college it is more real because you can put a face to it, a specific classmate with a specific CGPA and a specific international moot [2]. Mental strength is required in both, and he rates the two demands as broadly similar [2].

Takeaways

• Treat the whole paper as one skill: legal reasoning, critical reasoning and comprehension are the same task with different labels, and the panic attaches to the names rather than the questions [1][2].
• Fear of a section is self-fulfilling, because "the moment you are scared of it you've closed your mind to it"; approach every section with an open mind and a try-my-best attitude [1].
• Never skip quantitative techniques: eliminate one or two options with school-level arithmetic and guess, since one mark can decide admission [2].
• Take mocks in one hour fifty-five minutes to build a five-minute buffer for the real paper, and analyse the worst ones rather than laughing them off [1].
• For GK, use three sources done religiously instead of fifteen skimmed, remembering that the paper-setter works from a newspaper, not a syllabus [2].
• Guard against overconfidence as hard as against panic: one excellent sample paper cost him a month of falling scores [1].
• Keep one non-negotiable thing outside the exam, because total immersion makes a single bad mock feel like total failure when "there's a larger life beyond this" [2].
• Go into law school without a fixed career picture and let internships and exposure decide, especially as a first-generation lawyer with no familial guidance [1][2].