Advocate Yashvardhan Jayraj Rane, Founder – The Collective Counsel

Yashvardhan Rane never wanted to be a lawyer.

He says that upfront because it matters to everything that follows. Law wasn’t a calling he chased but it was something that found him. And once he was inside it, he gave it everything: a BA LLB, then an LLM, then an independent practice appearing before High Courts and District Courts, building a clientele that most lawyers spend years working toward.

By every conventional measure, he had made it.

And yet something was wrong.

What He Saw From Inside the Courtroom

The problem with being good at something broken is that you see the cracks more clearly than most.

Every procedural delay. Every morning where justice felt like it was moving through cement. Every brief where he watched the system grind down the very people it was supposed to serve. He wasn’t observing this from the outside, he was in the trenches, brief in hand, watching it happen up close. He had earned the right to stay comfortable. He chose not to.

What the system demands is a specific kind of compromise: survive here, and you learn to move the way it moves. You absorb its contradictions and call it pragmatism.

Rane couldn’t do that. He wasn’t built for it.

But before he could think about changing anything, he had to be honest about where the rot actually started.

The Problem Starts Before the Courtroom

It starts in law school.

Across India’s 1,600 law colleges, students are working hard, chasing internships, clearing exams and graduating completely unprepared for real legal work. Mentorship is inconsistent. Internships are often just letterhead, no actual learning. Opportunities cluster around a handful of cities and institutions. And nobody is telling students what the profession actually looks like, or what paths genuinely exist beyond the two familiar doors of litigation and corporate law.

Colleges are producing law graduates. They are not producing lawyers.

This wasn’t a new observation, legal educators and practitioners had been saying versions of it for years. What made Rane different was that he refused to file it away as someone else’s problem to solve.

Rane had seen this as a student. He had seen it again as a practitioner. And he couldn’t unsee it.

So He Built Something

No godfather. No legacy. No referrals to smooth the path.

He founded The Collective Counsel as a first-generation lawyer, for every other first-generation lawyer who is navigating this system without a map.

The Collective Counsel exists because the gap between legal education and legal practice is not a personal failure but a structural one. It was never designed to support most of the students entering it. Over time, that gap becomes self-doubt, wasted years, and lost potential.

What tCC offers is not a shortcut. It is a structured support system: practical skill-building, verified educators, peer accountability, and real exposure to the full landscape of legal careers, not just the two that everyone already knows about. The goal is straightforward: replace privilege, geography, and legacy as the deciding factors of a legal career, and replace them with clarity, competence, and honest growth.

Three thousand students mentored. Fifty-plus educators. Sixty-plus programmes. Partnerships with over ten institutions. Still early. But the numbers represent something real: students who found direction where the system had offered none.

What He Knows Now

Rane never planned any of this. The degree he didn’t choose. The career he excelled at but couldn’t settle for. The organisation he built in the space between what existed and what ought to.

But he has stopped thinking of any of it as accidental. Every step even the ones that looked like detours turned out to be load-bearing.

As Dumbledore once said and Rane will stand by the reference, “It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

He chose the road unexplored. He is still on it.

Advocate Yashvardhan Jayraj Rane is an LLM graduate, practicing advocate, and founder of The Collective Counsel — a legal education and mentorship platform working to bridge the gap between law school and real legal practice across India.