Educating lawyers for the augmentation economy: a future-skills curriculum audit of Indian legal education

Purpose This article examines the alignment between the skills demanded of future legal professionals and the curriculum mandated for Indian law degrees. It offers the first application of the future-skills cluster framework underpinning the QS World Future Skills Index to a single profession-facing discipline, using Indian legal education as the case. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative documentary analysis maps every component of the curriculum mandated by the Bar Council of India's Rules of Legal Education, 2008 against four future-skills clusters and digital/AI literacy, using a three-level coding scheme (direct, partial, absent). Curricular supply is then triangulated against employer demand evidence from the India Skills Report 2025, country-level alignment data from the QS World Future Skills Index 2027 and national labour-market analysis by NCAER. Findings Entrepreneurial capability and digital/AI literacy are structural gaps in the mandated curriculum; ethical instruction is present but confined to enrolment-oriented professional conduct; human-cognitive and leadership skills are exercised incidentally rather than taught or assessed as such. The discipline-level entrepreneurial void converges with the gap that QS independently identifies as India's largest national skills deficit. Legal education is additionally invisible in India's flagship employability measurement, removing the feedback loop through which other disciplines confront labour-market signals. Research limitations/implications The analysis maps the regulatory minimum rather than institutional practice, and demand-side evidence for the legal sector is inferred from economy-wide instruments. Both limitations define an agenda for primary research on legal employers and institutional curricula. Practical implications The findings support a periodic, market-referenced revision cycle for the mandated law curriculum, a mandated clinical paper on legal technology and artificial intelligence, relocation of entrepreneurial content into the compulsory core and structured practice pathways for legal academics. Social implications Access to justice depends on a steady supply of capable lawyers, many serving as sole practitioners in underserved regions. If artificial intelligence removes the junior work through which practitioners have traditionally developed, and curricula do not compensate, the resulting judgement deficit will fall hardest on litigants who cannot afford established counsel, widening existing inequalities in India's legal system. Originality/value The article contributes a replicable method for auditing a professionally mandated curriculum against future-skills frameworks, and advances the argument that artificial intelligence is dismantling the apprenticeship route through which legal judgement has traditionally been formed, converting curriculum reform from an employability question into a professional-formation question. The audit method is transferable: any profession or jurisdiction in which a statutory body mandates the curriculum can be examined in the same way, positioning the study as a case that speaks to curriculum evaluation across regulated professions.