In this in depth conversation, Advocate on Record Shloka Narayanan reflects on a legal career shaped not by rigid planning but by curiosity, adaptability, and timely opportunities. From discovering technology law almost by accident to representing global social media platforms and qualifying as an AOR at the Supreme Court of India, she shares candid insights into litigation, privacy law across jurisdictions, teaching at NLSIU, and sustaining mental resilience in a demanding profession. This interview offers valuable perspective for young lawyers navigating specialisation, competition, and the evolving intersection of law and technology.
This interview has been published by Anshi Mudgal and The SuperLawyer Team
As an Advocate on Record with over a decade of experience, how did you consciously choose this path of technology law, and how have you built and evolved your practice around this specialization over the years?
Actually, I would say it is just a series of fortunate events. I do not think that, when I was in law school, I thought I would become a technology lawyer. I did not even know there was something called technology law as a law student. But I think what happened is that the choices I made, for several reasons, sometimes personal and sometimes on a whim, led me down this path, and I have no regrets, of course. So, in 2020, when I joined Poovayya & Co. as an associate, I really started to explore technology law as a subject, and that is when I realised there is this entire field with people who specialise and do this kind of work.
I was actually hired by the law firm to do something quite different. I was hired to do regulatory law. I did that for a couple of months, but I did not enjoy it too much. The firm did not enjoy me doing that too much either, I think. Then, by chance, I worked on a few technology law matters, and it came more easily to me.
It was also around the time when COVID struck. Regular litigation had completely reduced, and we were receiving more and more advisory work, especially because in 2021 the new IT Rules were introduced. So, I would say it was a mix of various factors that led me to where I am today.
It was not a conscious decision. I feel that students coming out of law school these days know exactly what they want to do. They come for internships and say they want to do competition law or technology law. I had no such aims. I only knew that I wanted to litigate.
And then, just a series of decisions I made has led me to becoming a technology lawyer.
How did a practice you never consciously planned, including the decision to appear for the Advocate on Record examination, evolve into representing matters before the Supreme Court, and how has qualifying as an AOR recently changed your professional experience?
So, in my first three years of practice, I was doing a lot of general civil and commercial litigation.
And even when I was doing technology law work, I tried to keep in touch with that because that is also exciting in its own way. There is a lot of variety in civil law. There is a lot of learning in civil and commercial law, I feel. So I sort of did a 50–50 or 60–40 split of civil law as well. And then, when I moved to Delhi, I saw a lot of AORs around me, and I started to believe that somehow qualifying for this examination, or writing the examination, would allow me to do a variety of work outside of the tech law practice that I want to continue, because at the appellate level, at the Supreme Court level, almost all AORs do not pick and choose any specialisation. Every AOR does criminal matters as well as civil matters, and that gives you a very broad range of work that you can do.
So, yes, I am newly minted, and in that sense, it is very exciting at this stage to be able to appear every day in the Supreme Court. I always feel that trial work is far more difficult than working at the Supreme Court because here you are at the final stage, and you are picking faults in what the other lawyers at the lower courts did not do well.
But that is the tough part. At the Supreme Court, you have the benefit of hindsight. So you are able to come straight to the point, and in the two minutes that you get with a judge at the SLP admission stage, you have to convince someone. All of that is very exciting, but I want to continue doing civil work at the district court and the High Court, et cetera, because I think that is the tougher part of being a lawyer.
What advice would you give young professionals who enter the legal field with a fixed idea of the path they want to pursue, especially when many eventually find their interests evolving? How can they navigate intense competition, make thoughtful career choices, and remain open to the different learning opportunities that litigation at various court levels offers?
I mean, I still consider myself a bit young, so it is a young person giving advice to the young, let us say it like that. But no, jokes apart, I think that everybody should do a little bit of trial court and High Court work before coming to the Supreme Court.
And even if you choose a niche area, like competition law, or you want to practise before the TDSAT, I think six months to one year of trial court experience is something everybody must get, whether civil or criminal, because that holds you in good stead for the rest of your career. And the great thing about litigation and the law is that no decision is final.
Today, I may have decided that I have done technology law for many years, but tomorrow I can decide that I want to switch to criminal trial work. Of course, I would have to start from scratch, but it is not an irreversible decision. So I think you should always be open to making that switch and also playing to your own strengths. For example, I said I was hired for regulatory law, but I am not good at it. So you also have to be honest with yourself. You might want to do competition law, but that might be more difficult for you, and you might be better at securities law or something that comes more naturally to you.
So my general advice to anybody who asks me how to choose is not to be too rigid about what you want to do. In your first one to three years of practice, try to do as many matters as you can in different fields. My former senior used to tell me that you are only as good a lawyer as the variety of matters that you have done.
A lot of law is learnt only when you are handling a particular matter and are able to go in depth into that area of law. So, yes, I would say trial court experience is invaluable, and you should always be ready to change your mind and not be rigid about choosing just one field.
Alongside technology law, you work extensively in privacy law across multiple jurisdictions. How do you navigate differing regulatory frameworks and rapidly evolving developments, and ensure you stay updated with jurisdiction specific requirements when advising on complex matters? Given the coexistence of regimes like GDPR and India’s evolving data protection framework under the IT Act, how do you explain these shifts to clients and help organisations build privacy compliant policies, often from the ground up?
That is a very good question, and I think a lot of it has to do with interacting with people and looking at things from a business perspective, in addition to the legal perspective. And that, I think, is basically the USP of a technology or privacy lawyer. Everybody can read the Act and the Rules and say, this is what it says, right?
It is about going in depth into questions such as why a client is providing a service in a particular manner, why their server is located in a specific jurisdiction, why they do not want to change certain aspects of their offerings or product, and how difficult it is going to be for them to comply with the law.
You can do this mostly by hearing a client out, hearing different clients out, and keeping an eye on articles that people write. There is so much available online now, including newsletters and newspapers, where you will often find clients themselves putting out their concerns and real world problems. Reading these gives you real insight into how to provide solutions that are legally acceptable while still making commercial sense.
Any time a new Act or law comes out, my first instinct is to spend a couple of hours reading it myself, without looking at articles or criticism about it. After that, I discuss it with a group of lawyers and non lawyers, where we brainstorm what the Rules say, how they could be better, and what the good parts are. I remember doing this when the IT Rules came out and again when the DPDP came out. I think a lot of insight comes from spending time reading the law yourself and then interacting with clients to understand their business perspective.
Alongside your practice as an AOR and your client work, you are also a guest faculty at NLSIU, teaching tribal law. How do you balance these roles, and how do you prepare for teaching when discussions can be unpredictable? What differences do you notice between conversations in the courtroom and those with highly engaged students, and how do you navigate both spaces?
Actually, that is a really good connection that you made. That is another way in which interacting with students and their questions helps me gain a lot more perspective on a daily basis, so that is a really good segue into this.
Well, the short answer is no, most of the time I do not balance it well. There are days when I postpone my class at the last minute because some matter is listed for final hearing on a Monday, and there are days when I have to set a question paper for the class, so I end up taking an adjournment from a hearing.
So yes, the short answer is that I do not think there is a good way to balance it. I try, but I fail a lot. But yes, you are right that, especially the programme that I teach, it is not meant only for lawyers. It is meant for people from all sorts of backgrounds. So that is another aspect where I have to ensure that the content I teach is accessible to non lawyers as well. Insofar as material is concerned, I have access to the NLS library, and there is a lot of material there, especially from outside India, which is written in a manner that is more accessible to non lawyers. So I do tend to rely a lot on non Indian material.
But otherwise also, because technology law, privacy law, and data protection are still at such a nascent stage, most of the classes are more discussion based. Some of the people I call students work in ministries or as police officers, so they know much more about these issues tactically than I do. Their insights are actually invaluable when we are examining legal questions, and it helps me think about things from a different perspective, especially with generative AI. I do not have a technical background and only understand the legal side, but many of my students explain the technical aspects clearly to me. I then apply legal concepts to those explanations and discuss how things might play out, because at the moment there is no certainty. There is no settled law. Some courts are, of course, considering these issues, but there is still no clarity.
Does your engagement with students at NLSIU influence your approach as an AOR, and do classroom discussions on emerging issues help shape your thinking for present and future cases in India?
Definitely, it does help. Sometimes, for example, I remember that in a recent class, one of the students was asking me how it is that all celebrities are approaching the Delhi High Court to obtain injunctive orders for personality rights.
That is a very good point, right? Because most of them are based out of Bombay or are definitely not based out of Delhi. I thought that was a very good question coming from a non lawyer. Then, a few days later, I saw that one of the Delhi High Court judges asked the same question.
He asked how the Delhi High Court has territorial jurisdiction to decide such disputes. I am not directly involved in that litigation, but there are definitely connections between the teaching aspect and the practical aspect, especially in this field, because it is so evolving. Sometimes, the litigant approaching the court is closely related to the kind of student we discuss these issues with, not in a direct sense, but because, at the end of the day, a litigant is a member of the general public who is interested in technology, privacy, and data protection.
So it is very closely connected, and I think justice is also becoming more accessible now. With online hearings, people are able to log in and watch what exactly happens in court. They are interested in seeing the courts’ final views on issues such as personality rights, data protection, and large companies using data, including whether that amounts to consideration in a contract.
So I think it is very closely related, and it is only going to become more pronounced as we move forward. It is therefore a very good idea for younger professionals to closely relate what is happening in the courts with discussions in academic fora, such as PG diploma programmes in technology law.
As someone who has represented major social media platforms in litigation across India, how do you explain to them, in simple terms, the need to stay equipped not only with evolving privacy and data laws but also with the broader societal and ethical impact of rapid technological disruption, including emerging concerns such as neuro rights?
So I noticed that with large technology companies, the companies actually already know these things. You do not have to explain it to them. They are very, very competent, not just in terms of their legal teams, but in general as well. All social media companies, I think, have representatives who are very aware of the power of social media and also its downsides. So I think they know that they have to toe a very fine balance. The fact that they have operations in so many countries means they bring learnings from various jurisdictions to India and, of course, carry their experiences from India elsewhere as well.
As a general comment, what we mostly have to explain to them is Indian litigation. Everything else, they can explain to us. The challenge sometimes arises because Indian litigation is very, very different from litigating in Europe, the US, or even Singapore, in terms of variability, timelines, costs, and unpredictability. They really look to you as counsel to give them inputs on these aspects, especially because there is no codified law in many of these areas, for example, global blocking or the right to be forgotten.
Many of the hot issues in technology law today work both ways. They allow social media companies to put forth their views and help shape the law in a manner that works for them as well as for consumers. At the same time, this also creates a lot of flexibility and uncertainty about what might happen tomorrow. If Indian law were suddenly to recognise a right to be forgotten, the question becomes how companies would comply with such orders. It is not a matter of changing engineering systems across the world, but changing them for one specific jurisdiction, which significantly increases the cost of compliance.
These are the kinds of issues that really need to be explained to them. Otherwise, in many circumstances, they know more than I do.
Looking back on your decade of practice, what has been your most challenging technology law case in terms of strategy, and how have you seen Indian tech litigation evolve for you and your clients over the years?
The most challenging case, I mean, it’s tough to name one. I feel like a lot, but there is one client that I was representing quite regularly at the firm and all of those clients’ cases were challenging in the sense that as a social media company, you generally take a very neutral position. But this particular client was happy to take a more hard stance. And in all of that there were a few big ticket litigations for them in India, and I advised on most of them, or I was representing them on most of them.
Those were really challenging for many reasons. One is that, like I said, you have to explain Indian litigation to them in a language that they will understand.
We are towards the end of this particular conversation, i really am fascinated to ask right now about how you balance your physical and mental health because you are dealing with some very big social media giants as you work in a very competitive environment.
It’s very tough. I mean, there’s no other answer to it because I’ve had phases where I’ve really struggled to maintain good mental and physical health.
Especially because I think the biggest challenge is time. Time is not in your control when you’re litigating, and especially if your clients are not in India. You have to make time for calls at odd hours and all of that. The first thing you sacrifice is going to the gym, taking a walk, or whatever it is dance class or anything else that contributes to fitness which I think takes a hit first.
The same goes for food habits. If you spend longer in the office, you tend to order food, that kind of thing. But I think at some point, maybe two or three years ago, I sat with myself and said this is not going to work. There’s no point in being burned out at 32 or 33. As someone told me, litigation is not a sprint; it’s a marathon.
If you have to work until you are 70 or 80, you have to take care of yourself. Over the last two years, things have tremendously improved because you have to decide to prioritize it. If you mentally commit to ensuring you have time in a day to work out and time to spend with your family, it is possible. There will be bad weeks, there will be bad days, but you have to be strict with yourself.
The biggest challenge, I think, is being able to say no to telling a client that you cannot take their matter because of a personal commitment, like getting married or other obligations. Otherwise, there is no end to it, and it is very competitive. If you are not willing to do it, someone else is willing to do it, perhaps better and maybe at a more affordable price. But that is the cost at which your mental and physical health comes.
So I think after 25 or 26, you have to prioritize it and recognize that this is also important if you want to survive until 65 or 70. But it is tough.
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