Manan Kumar Mishra

The Bar Council of India (BCI) noticed the “gradually detracting” (sic) “standard of dresses by the students of law all over the country” and recommended all law colleges to devise their own dress codes “befitting the profession”, but “it would be preferable” if a dress codes of white shirt with white, black or grey trousers was followed.

If the Supreme Court is serious about examining the legality of the bar exam, it should also examine whether the award of the contract to ITES Horizon by the BCI was illegal, or worse...

The Bar Council of India (BCI) has implemented two new compulsory requirements for lawyers – submit all educational qualification certificates and get a certification from “court procedure and ethics” training academies, in order to practice in courts.

The BCI is collecting all the certificates of lawyers, “starting class X board results” as part of a long-winded “verification process” which will help the regulator identify the lawyers who have not practiced in the last five years and weed them out, reported the Times of India.

After such identification, under the BCI Certificate and Place of Practice (Verification) Rules 2015 the lawyers who have not practiced for the last five years will no longer have the licence to practice but can continue to remain enrolled as advocates.

BCI chairman Manan Kumar Mishra told the TOI that the “verification process may surprise many and far exceed the initial estimates that over 30% lawyers have fake degrees”.He said: “We have implemented the BCI Certificate and Place of Practice (Verification) Rules 2015 and have now made it mandatory for all lawyers to re-register in a new format where they have to compulsorily submit all their certificates starting class X board results.”

“These certificates will then be verified with respective universities and boards,” added the report.

Mishra had said in 2015 that about 20 per cent of practicing lawyers don’t have a valid law degree. He had approached the central government for funds to start lawyers’ academy while promising to weed out lawyers with fake degrees.

In 2011 there were 1.3 million lawyers in India, revealed a right to information (RTI) response by the Bar Council of India (BCI) to Delhi-based advocate Kush Kalra, with an average annual growth rate between 2007 and 2011 of around 4 per cent, as reported by Legally India.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) told the Supreme Court today that it unanimously agreed that advocates’ alleged assault of journalists and senior advocates outside of Patiala House district court last week was “really shameful” and a “very unfortunate... incident” that should not be tolerated, according to its affidavit published by Live Law, but that those attacks should be dealt with separately from the alleged attacks on the ‘unlawful assembly’ of JNU students who “need[ed] to be opposed strongly” and “strongly condemned”.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) would conduct an inquiry into yesterday’s alleged assaults on journalists and others by lawyers outside the Patiala House district court.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) unanimously voted in S Prabhakaran as its new chairman yesterday, for the next four months. The BCI also unanimously voted in Prabhakaran’s predecessor Manan Kumar Mishra to preside at the BCI as its third-time chairman from May 2016 onwards.

Madurai advocates association president W Peter Ramesh Kumar was asked to answer to contempt charges by the Madras high court after the high court felt his attitude was “one of confrontation”, reported PTI.

Ramesh is the president of the Madurai Bench High Court Advocates Association and he was one of 14 lawyers suspended by the Bar Council of India for violence.

A division bench at the Madras high court’s Madurai bench - justices V Ramasubramanian and N Kirubakaran - initiated suo motu contempt proceedings against him, asked him to file his reply by 19 January and rejected his request for eight weeks time to reply.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) renewed its dubiously awarded bar exam contract to underperforming exam agency ITES Horizon, without a public tender of the contract and without holding a council meeting for members’ consensus on the renewal.

The notice has reportedly being sent by the Bar Council of India (BCI) to the seven sitting Tamil Nadu and Puducherry state bar council members for opposing the BCI’s earlier purported disqualification of 15 local advocates for alleged violence.

BCI sources in New Delhi told TOI on Wednesday that the BCI chairman, Manan Kumar Mishra, had written to the Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry directing the latter to give a list of its members who had participated in the Trichy meeting. Relying on the statement of the additional solicitor-general, the BCI chairman wanted the state council to issue a show-cause notice to the members and seek explanation.

reported The Times of India.

Disqualified advocates are not allowed to contest bar council elections for six years.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) has suspended 15 lawyers who were allegedly involved in violence in the Madras high court, reported The Hindu and others.

Two weeks after Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra had said at an event that 30 per cent of lawyers were "fake", held "fraudulent degrees" or were "non-practising" but still on the rolls, the government's Press Information Bureau (PIB) reported yesterday that the BCI told the government that "the number of fake lawyers cannot be exactly ascertained by now".

Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra, who is also the Bihar State Bar Council’s (BSBC) representative at BCI, apologised to the Patna high court for the “mistakes” of the BSBC as the court admonished the BSBC for calling a state-wide lawyer strike on July 15, reported the Times of India.

Chief justice L Narasimha Reddy and justice Anjana Mishra observed that the BSBC had “tarnished the image of the legal profession”, through its call to strike against corruption in the lower judiciary, even though the cause of its strike was “laudable”. The observation came as the bench was hearing an unrelated case.

Mishra appeared before the bench to apologise.

Kian Ganz looks into the BCI’s latest claim that 30 per cent of lawyers are not really lawyers and asks, how the BCI knows.

Two publications, Livelaw, which caters to lawyers, and The Hoot, which primarily has journalists as an audience, have written about Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra’s legal notice against Legally India.

Legally India has responded to the legal notice sent by Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra on 25 May 2015 to Legally India, Kian Ganz and Prachi Shrivastava.

Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra has sent an unsolicited email to Legally India’s editor Kian Ganz earlier today, after having sent a legal notice claiming defamation just over one week ago.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra has sent a letter to Legally India and 147 other recipients, including journalists, the President and Prime Minister of India, all Supreme Court judges and high court judges and others.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) has complied with Legally India’s 20 October 2014 right to information (RTI) request on 20 April 2015, supplying around 1,600 pages of documents.