By Andrew Cohen
Geetika Jerath ’19 went to law school planning to advise entrepreneurs — and ended up becoming one.
“I thought my impact would come from advising founders who were building the next big thing,” she says. “As it turned out, Berkeley Law gave me the education, the experience, and the courage that I’d eventually use to build a company with my co-founder.”
That company, rubi, is helping to reshape how a new generation of lawyers is trained. Launched last November, it serves as a virtual apprenticeship platform designed to help new transactional lawyers get ahead of the curve.
With remote work and AI reshaping legal practice, rubi participants step into the role of a Big Law junior associate, with step-by-step guidance through every task, decision, and document. Jerath and co-founder Madison Keeble, her former colleague at Norton Rose Fulbright in Austin, Texas drew on valuable lessons from their 25,000-plus billable hours — carefully crafting a template to help new transactional lawyers.
In 10 to 15 hours, participants complete digestible online units that fit into busy schedules. They work through assignments that progressively build on each other — managing competing priorities, analyzing change of control provisions, and drafting a full transaction checklist.
“About three years ago, we had an idea for a new way to train transactional lawyers,” Jerath says. “We believed there was a way to take the knowledge, skills, and understanding junior corporate lawyers usually spend years piecing together and teach it all upfront. As remote work and AI were beginning to reshape legal practice, we wanted the apprenticeship model to evolve alongside it.”
Painstaking preparation
Jerath and Keeble spent two and a half years building the curriculum with a full year of pilot testing — from pre-law and law students to attorneys ranging from their first to 10th year — to make sure the program truly worked before putting it out into the world.
“We were willing to wait until we felt we had gotten it right,” Jerath says. “Once we were seeing pre-law students in our pilot producing stronger work product than junior lawyers in Big Law, we knew we were ready to launch.”
Geetika Jerath ’19
- Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch in America awards for Mergers & Acquisitions Law and Project Finance Law in 2024 and 2025
- Served as a core deal team member of the IJInvestor 2023 Renewables Acquisition of the Year in North America
- Elected University of Texas Senate of College Councils president, representing 54,000 students and serving on over 15 university-wide committees
- Hired by then-UT Chancellor William McRaven, who led the U.S. Special Operations Command raid that killed Osama bin Laden, to design a strategic planning process for the UT System based on the command’s template
- As special assistant to the president, led UT’s international strategy and assisted the university’s lead counsel with oral argument preparation for the Supreme Court case Fisher v. University of Texas, which affirmed that the university’s race-conscious admissions policy was lawful under the Equal Protection Clause
It took a year and a half to develop rubi’s curriculum, then another year to distill it, build a platform, and pilot it across the industry. Learning how to run a startup in real time, Jerath and Keeble developed the first virtual apprenticeship in transactional law where junior lawyers and law students work through every step of a comprehensive megadeal.
“It’s as if we’re at their desks, teaching not just what to do, but why they’re doing it, what questions to ask, and how everything fits into the bigger picture,” Jerath explains. “The core philosophy behind rubi is that junior lawyers shouldn’t have to spend years piecing together how to practice law.”
The early reviews are affirming. Even before rubi’s public launch, the University of Texas — where Jerath and Keeble were undergrads — sponsored access for the entire law school. Over 300 students are completing the program, and attorneys and students at other law schools are purchasing it on their own.
“With many firms’ hiring timelines accelerating rapidly, the exposure to transactional work that rubi provides can help guide 1Ls as they’re deciding between career paths,” says Texas Law rising 2L Vikram Joshi. “The thing that I found most useful was the depth of the lesson videos. I really appreciated that Geetika and Madison took the time to explain why they were writing things in certain ways, and why different partners may prefer different methods.”
Rising Texas Law 3L Emily Wood liked how “instead of teaching skills in isolation, rubi walked me through a full sample M&A deal from start to finish so every task, every document, every decision lives inside the bigger picture.” She also enjoyed learning what’s actually expected of a junior transactional associate day-to-day — “the unwritten things about how to take on an assignment, deliver work product, and fit into a deal team.”
Learning how determining the scope of diligence sets up the diligence process, how diligence shapes the purchase agreement, and how the purchase agreement drives closing gave Wood “a clearer understanding of what transactional attorneys actually do all day; that doesn’t replace the learning I’ll do on the ground, but it means I can spend more time actually contributing and less time trying to orient myself.”
Back in Berkeley
Maintaining close ties with Berkeley Law, Jerath spoke with students in Professor Ofer Eldar’s Venture Capital Law and Finance class in April and joined Keeble in talking to Berkeley Law’s Leadership Academy student cohort.
“I chose Berkeley Law because I wanted to make a meaningful impact in the world, and it felt like a place where I’d be surrounded by people who wanted to do the same. I was right,” she says. “Every classmate I met had a reason for being there, and their conviction was contagious.”
Active in the school’s Startup Law Initiative while a student, Jerath served as its president and coordinated with major area law firms to provide free incorporation services to low-income and diverse founders in the Bay Area.
“Berkeley Law gave me hands-on transactional experience from my very first year, which is something most law schools don’t offer 1Ls,” says Jerath, who was also a Berkeley Business Law Journal senior development editor and a supervising editor on its blog. “It was incredibly meaningful work. I got to support and learn from founders in our community while also learning how to do that work from leading firms.”
At one point in their careers, Jerath and Keeble were successfully accelerating toward Big Law partnership. Veering off that lucrative path to bet on themselves, and creating a novel program from scratch that is helping full-time attorneys and student summer associates at top firms, provides continuous validation.
“As first-generation lawyers and women in Big Law, and for me as a woman of color, we understood how uneven access to mentorship, institutional knowledge, and opportunities can shape someone’s career,” Jerath says. “We wanted to build something meaningful that helped level the playing field.”