Shivraj Patil in New Delhi 2007.
Law and civil service Menon started his career in 1955, as an apprentice to a locally known lawyer, V. Nagappan Nair, and assisted him for thirteenmonths. The next year, in 1956, he registered at the
High Court of Kerala, in Ernakulam, as a lawyer and started practice under advocate Poovanpallil Neelakandan Pillai at the district court in Thiruvananthapuram. One year later, Menon appeared for the
Civil Services Examination and got placed into the
Central Secretariat Service in New Delhi. On the advice of his teacher and mentor,
A.T. Markose, the first director of the
Indian Law Institute and the author of
Judicial Control of Administrative Action in India, he took up the job at Central Secretariat in New Delhi. He was also the first non- Muslim to be appointed warden of a hostel at Aligarh Muslim University. Soon, his second book,
Law and Property was published by N. M. Tripathy Co. He also published an article, co-authored by Clarke Cunningham in the
Michigan Law Review. Menon, while working in Delhi, is known to have organized the annual conference of the All India Law Teachers Association, in 1972, where he was elected as the Secretary General of the association. He has served as a member of the Committee for Implementing Legal Aid Schemes (CILAS), which was formed under the chairmanship of
V. R. Krishna Iyer, by the
Indira Gandhi government, in connection with the
Garibi Hatao programme. He has also served as the secretary of the
Bar Council of India Trust. During an interlude, he worked as the principal of the Government Law College, Pondicherry. When the Bar Council of India decided to establish a new
law school in early 1980s, Menon's services were sought and he is known to have set up the Bangalore-based
National Law School of India University (NLSIU) with a government grant. The school was the first in India to use the
Harvard Law School's
case study method, which later became the mainstream form of
legal education in India. Menon worked at NLSIU for twelveyears as the director, moving after the institution gained university status. In 1998, Menon was invited by the
Government of West Bengal under
Jyoti Basu to set up the
West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS) on the lines of the Bangalore initiative. As the first
vice-chancellor, he is known to have developed its infrastructure and educational curriculum and held the post till 2003, when the
Supreme Court of India asked him to take over the responsibility as the first director of the newly formed
National Judicial Academy a training centre for judges where he worked till his retirement in 2006. ==Post-retirement positions==