Why Pakistan's justice system isn't ready for the tsunami ahead

From Brunei to Beacon House: an unusual starting point

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Shayyan Qaiser as a former school senior whose career has moved at what he calls “a meteoric pace” — LLB from the University of London external program, Bar from Lincoln’s Inn, law clerk to a former Chief Justice of Pakistan, and an LLM from Harvard Law School. It is a résumé that sounds linear on paper. The conversation quickly reveals it was anything but.

Shayyan was born in Boston, spent her early years in Brunei — where her father was based at the University of Brunei Darussalam — and returned to Pakistan for schooling at Beacon House Margala from grade three through A levels. She describes herself, without hesitation, as “as desi as it gets,” even though she is Pakistani and Singaporean, with a Chinese-Singaporean mother who worked in journalism. That dual identity, she explains, has been a source of friction throughout her career, particularly in the lower courts.

Her path to law was not obvious. She loved mathematics — “the young, like, 12, 13 year old solving algebra” — and seriously considered a career in pure mathematics before reading To Kill a Mockingbird during O levels. Atticus Finch was the first encounter. John Grisham followed. By the time she reached eleventh grade, she had ruled out medicine and engineering and taken law as an A level subject alongside math and economics.

The University of London external program and what it costs you

Shayyan completed her LLB through the University of London external program, studying in Islamabad. She is candid about the trade-off. The degree carries the weight of a foreign qualification, but the experience resembles high school tuition more than campus life. “It was very similar to that,” she says. “Going into it, this was something that we recognised as a family.”

Her parents encouraged her to read widely on the side — philosophy, literature — to compensate for the absence of a major and the social infrastructure of a campus. She describes the grades as a genuine challenge, particularly coming from a background where she had expected a hundred in A levels and received ninety-nine. “I was quite bummed,” she says, with the kind of self-awareness that makes the admission funny rather than self-pitying.

Lincoln’s Inn, the Bar, and what the dinners are actually for

After graduating in 2012, Shayyan went to London to complete the Bar Professional Training Course at City University, joining Lincoln’s Inn — one of four Inns of Court in the UK. Muzamil asks her to explain the structure for listeners unfamiliar with how the Bar fits into a legal career. She walks through it carefully: every jurisdiction requires you to be “called to the bar,” meaning licensed to appear before courts. In the UK, that splits into barristers, who appear in court, and solicitors, who do the work outside it.

The Bar course itself is ten months, with twelve exams at the end. The Inns of Court run in parallel — you attend qualifying sessions, dinners, advocacy weekends. Shayyan pushes back on the common criticism that the dinners are purely social. “It’s where you interact, you see how kind of profession this is supposed to be, how you stand up for the clients and professional ethics. It’s all a part of that system.”

She became a non-practising barrister — non-practising for the purposes of England and Wales, because she always intended to return to Pakistan. The skills and the title came back with her. The pupilage required to actually appear in English courts did not.

Two years in the کچہری, and what it means to be visibly different there

Back in Pakistan in 2013, Shayyan joined a civil litigation and corporate commercial law firm in Islamabad and spent two years working up from the district courts. She describes it as “the hardest mode to play in” — being a woman, being an Islamabad burger, and looking visibly foreign in a space where that combination generates constant friction.

“I look like a foreigner,” she says plainly. Clients questioned whether she understood Pakistani law. Judges asked her mid-hearing about her background. “I’m just here for a client and now suddenly it’s about myself.” She is careful to note that her seniors at the firm always backed her, and that there were advantages too. But the کچہری experience, she says, was an eye-opener she is glad she had. “That’s where all your cases start. You know, کچھ ہوتے ہیں جو high court سے شروع کر جاتے ہیں — but really, the grassroots level, جو ایک عام آدمی کے مسائل ہیں، وہ تو وہیں سے شروع ہوتے ہیں.”

Inside the Supreme Court: the Asia Bibi judgment and the meaning of “just work”

After two years in the lower courts and the high court, Shayyan applied for the clerkship program at the Supreme Court — a program borrowed from American legal tradition, where clerks are assigned to individual judges, attend proceedings, conduct research, and assist on cases. She clerked from 2015 to 2017, initially with Justice Saqib Nisar when he was the fourth most senior judge, and then — by fortunate timing — as he became Chief Justice.

Muzamil asks her to describe the human reality of that transition: from a dinner table where lawyers talk about their day to a space of national and international importance. Her answer is deliberately understated. “For me, it was mostly… put your head down, work hard, and the rest just wasn’t relevant.”

The case that stood out most was the Asia Bibi judgment. When Muzamil asks whether there was internal pressure on the team given the public weight of the case, Shayyan says the space she was given was one where the law came first, regardless of the noise outside. “You follow the law and that’s it. The law is there. And that’s the basis on how judgments are delivered and should be delivered.”

She is equally clear about the limits of lawyer competence in the courtroom: when a lawyer fails to pursue a case properly, experienced judges apply their own minds to the case file and the law in front of them. The system has some self-correcting capacity at the top, even when the advocacy is weak.

Harvard, impostor syndrome, and the decision not to sit the New York Bar

The clerkship was always, in part, a stepping stone. Shayyan had put a pin in postgraduate education since her LLB, waiting until her profile was strong enough for the universities she wanted. She applied to Oxford twice, to Yale, to LSE, and to Harvard. Oxford rejected her again. Yale rejected her. Harvard was one of the last to respond.

“Disbelief,” she says, when Muzamil asks what the moment felt like. “That’s all I can say.”

She received a near-full scholarship. She took five days off after her last day at the Supreme Court — her mentor asked why she wasn’t taking more time — packed, and flew to Boston. The shift from the intensity of the Supreme Court to being a student again was, she says, “refreshing.” Her mind was being stimulated in a completely different way.

The LLM cohort included twenty-one-year-olds fresh from Cambridge with first-class degrees and thirty-year-olds who had completed PhDs. The orientation lecturer told the entire class on day one that they would all feel impostor syndrome, that their applications had not been mistakes, and that they were there to learn from each other. “I was so right,” Shayyan says. “And I’m so glad they told us that.”

She did not sit the New York Bar. She had already decided to return to Pakistan and chose courses based on interest rather than qualification requirements. Later, when she began thinking about Singapore and international mobility, she felt the absence. “In hindsight, yes. I wish I had.”

The backlog is not the real problem — the tsunami is

The conversation’s sharpest section begins when Muzamil draws a parallel between medicine and law: both are systems where the demand for service vastly exceeds the supply of qualified professionals, and both are candidates for technology-driven disruption. He asks Shayyan whether she has thought about how AI could aid in delivering justice at scale.

She has. Working in Singapore — which she describes as “a mecca of technology right now” — and having spent time at Amazon, she has seen what even basic digitisation can do. “Something as simple as you know to avoid the rush — you have your case number, your ticket comes up, you go in. How difficult is it?” She is not being dismissive of AI. She is pointing out that Pakistan’s courts are still on paper, that twenty-year-old files go missing, that physical space is itself a constraint on judicial efficiency.

Muzamil pushes further: could the session courts be automated, with the high court retaining human judges for appeals? Shayyan engages seriously. She notes that China has already moved in this direction, with AI-assisted judicial opinions. She agrees that the margin of error from a well-trained machine operating on digitised precedents and a structured decision tree could be lower than the current margin of error from an overworked, under-resourced, and sometimes corrupt session court system. “I think it’s quite possible that it could actually benefit, to a great extent, especially the backlog.”

Her reservation is not a defence of the status quo. It is a design question: the data feeding any AI system still comes from humans, and the precedents it learns from were generated by humans. Some supervisory layer — a district judge reviewing outputs, flagging errors, feeding corrections back into the system — is probably necessary. “It’s also about empowering the user rather than eliminating them completely.”

Later in the discussion, Muzamil frames the deeper issue: Pakistan’s 49% youth population means the demand on courts is about to multiply in ways the current system cannot absorb. The localised jirga and arbitration systems that once resolved rural disputes are dissolving as urbanisation accelerates. “We’re not even close to equipped,” he says, “to deal with not just the mess we already have, but the tsunami of mess we’re about to encounter.” Shayyan agrees. The conversation about fixing the backlog, she implies, is already the wrong conversation.

SQLaw, Singapore, and the legal gap Pakistan’s startups don’t know they have

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Shayyan where she is headed. She describes a pivot toward being a “trusted legal business advisor” — focused on contracts, B2B and B2C structures, customer-facing policies — with Pakistan and the broader region in view. She started her own independent consultancy after returning from Harvard, advising startups and companies, and that work pointed her toward Singapore and the tech-law intersection.

The demand for this kind of service in Pakistan, she says, is not where it should be. Startups defer legal structuring because it feels like a cost rather than a foundation. “Having a watertight contract — it’s something that even startups say, ‘yaar, pehle hum operationally figure out karte hain, yeh cheezein baad mein.’” She is direct about the consequence: several of Pakistan’s most prominent startup collapses could have been avoided with better structures in place during the growth phase.

An encounter at a Dubai conference stays with her. An Indian VC, invested in seven or eight Pakistani fintech startups, told her he was planning to double down on Pakistan precisely because the current economic difficulty was a predictable blip — one he had been waiting for. “Maybe sometimes you have to look from the outside to be able to understand the opportunity there,” Shayyan reflects.

On Pakistan in 2050, she offers what she calls an initially pessimistic but ultimately optimistic view. Legal awareness among ordinary citizens has grown. There is a slow realisation at the policy level that the current system is not working at its optimum. Time will be required. But the combination of bottom-up awareness and top-down acknowledgement, she suggests, is at least the right starting condition — even if the pace of change remains the central uncertainty.