3rd NLS-SAM FinTech Moot Court Competition 2026-27 by NLSIU Bengaluru and Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas [28-29 November 2026; Hybrid; Registration Fee Rs 2,500]

The Moot Court Society of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, in association with Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co (SAM), is holding the third edition of the NLS-SAM FinTech Moot Court Competition, 2026-2027. The oral rounds are scheduled for 28 and 29 November 2026 at the NLSIU campus in Bengaluru, with the virtual screening rounds held earlier on 24 and 25 October 2026.

The competition is dedicated to the evolving field of fintech law at the intersection of finance and technology. It is built to make participants engage with the regulatory challenges that rapid technological change has created in the financial sector, and to explore how the frameworks governing that space are being reshaped. A one-day FinTech Regulation Conference is held alongside the moot, giving students, academics and practitioners a shared forum on the same set of questions.

This year's problem addresses the legal, constitutional and regulatory challenges arising from the deployment of artificial intelligence and machine learning systems in financial services. It has been drafted by the FinTech team at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co.

The issues span:

• The constitutionality of a blanket prohibition on AI-driven credit underwriting and KYC verification;
• The fundamental rights of informal-income applicants who are systematically excluded by opaque algorithmic decision-making;
• The application of copyright law to the training of machine learning models on proprietary datasets.

The proposition was released to registered teams on 22 August 2026.

The competition is open to all students enrolled bona fide on a regular basis in an undergraduate or postgraduate law course, including LL.M. programmes, or its equivalent, conducted by any recognised institution.

• Only students in their 2nd year or above of the B.A. LL.B. or any integrated five-year law programme are eligible;
• Students of the three-year LL.B. programme are eligible;
• A recognised institution may send only one team. Where a university has constituent colleges, each college may register a team, or the university may be represented by a single team drawn from different constituent colleges.

A team may have a minimum of two and a maximum of three members. In each oral round only two members argue as speakers; the remaining member may not assist them while arguments are being presented. Different members may speak in different rounds.

To be eligible for the Best Speaker award, a participant must have argued at least once for the Petitioner and once for the Respondent in the preliminary rounds, and the award is decided on the average score per argument.

Once registered, a team may not change its composition except with the express permission of the administrators, and only where due reason is shown. Certificates of participation are prepared from the team details submitted at final registration, so names must be entered exactly as they should appear.

Final registration is completed through the online registration form, which is open and accepting responses. Teams must nominate a primary Point of Contact on the form; all communication about the moot goes to that person by email, and it is their responsibility to pass it on to the team.

• Upfront registration fee: Rs 2,500 per team, non-refundable, payable through the Razorpay payment page;
• Additional participation fee: Rs 7,500, payable only by teams that qualify for the offline oral rounds. This is inclusive of accommodation, food, and travel between the venue and the accommodation provided;
• The Point of Contact must email a screenshot of the payment within three days of the payment deadline expiring, and attach a copy of the payment receipt in the prescribed field of the registration form.

The Rulebook records 21 August 2026 as the deadline for payment of the registration fee, while the University's announcement of 21 August 2026 sets 24 August 2026 as the deadline for final registration. Teams registering now should confirm the payment position directly with the organising committee.

Once a team registers, the administrators allot it a team code, communicated by email, which serves as its sole identifier for memorials and at the oral rounds. The administrators reserve absolute discretion to refuse or cancel any registration.

Each team must prepare one Petitioner memorial and one Respondent memorial, both in English, and send soft copies for each side in both Microsoft Word and PDF formats through the designated form on or before 25 September 2026. Submissions after 11:59 PM IST on that date are treated as late and penalised under the Rulebook.

Each memorial must be a single file named with the allotted team code followed by P for Petitioner or R for Respondent, for example 2P and 2R.

Every memorial must contain all of, and only, the following components in this order: Cover Page, Table of Contents, Table of Abbreviations, Index of Authorities, Statement of Jurisdiction, Statement of Facts, Issues Raised, Summary of Arguments, Arguments Advanced or Pleadings, and Prayer.

• Arguments Advanced and Prayer, including all headings and sub-headings: Times New Roman size 12, 1.5 line spacing, justified;
• Footnotes: Times New Roman size 10, 1.0 line spacing, justified, with no additional space between footnotes;
• A4 pages with a one-inch margin on all sides, and no condensed character spacing;
• Summary of Arguments must not exceed two pages and may carry no citations;
• Arguments Advanced and Prayer together must not exceed 25 pages.

Non-compliance with the formatting requirements attracts page-wise deductions. Teams must research and write their memorials without assistance from non-members; Faculty Advisors and coaches may give only general advice on the area of law, the structure of arguments and general commentary.

All registered teams first take part in a virtual Screening Oral Round, held on 24 and 25 October 2026 on a platform communicated by the administrators. Teams that come through the screening proceed to the in-person oral rounds at NLSIU, Bengaluru, on 28 and 29 November 2026, with the Grand Final held on 29 November 2026.

Teams are anonymous throughout and are identified only by their team code; violation of the anonymity rule attracts severe penalty or disqualification. Scouting, that is, observing the oral rounds of another team, is regulated by the Rulebook, and the Bench Memorandum is confidential at all times.

The Rulebook permits AI use only for finding relevant sources through AI-enhanced research tools, AI-enhanced proof-reading, AI-enhanced translation of legal sources, AI-assisted English translation of text within the memorandum (permitted but strongly discouraged), and generating overviews or briefings purely for a team's own research. No such overview or briefing may be submitted as part of the written memorandum.

All other uses are expressly prohibited and result in the memorandum being automatically disqualified, with the team liable to be disqualified from the competition and barred from future editions. Including AI-generated text in a memorandum, even after the team has altered or corrected it, is a violation, as is training an AI tool on documents issued by NLS or using a tool trained on the moot problem to write any part of a memorandum.

National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru was established in 1986-87 as the first National Law University in India, through a collaboration between the Bar Council of India, the judiciary and the Government of Karnataka. It introduced the country's first five-year integrated B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) programme in 1988 and operates from a 23-acre residential campus in Nagarbhavi, Bengaluru. NLSIU is the only Indian institution to have won the Philip C. Jessup Moot twice, and has also won the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot and reached advanced stages of the Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot in recent years.

Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co (SAM) is one of India's leading full-service law firms, holding ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification. It is recognised for its practices in mergers and acquisitions, private equity, competition law, insolvency and restructuring, dispute resolution, international commercial arbitration, capital markets, banking and finance, tax, intellectual property, data protection and privacy, white collar crime, technology law, and infrastructure, energy and project finance. The firm has a pan-India presence with over 1,000 lawyers, including 193 partners, across offices in New Delhi, Mumbai, Gurugram, Ahmedabad, GIFT City (Gandhinagar), Kolkata, Bengaluru and Chennai.