Bar Council of India (BCI)

The results to the All India Bar Exam (AIBE) 9 will be out on 16 May, announced the Bar Council of India (BCI) on the official bar exam website:

The government is considering replacing regulators for the the legal, medical, chartered accountancy, cost accountancy, and company secretarial professions.

The All India Bar Exam (AIBE) IX’s results are tentatively expected to be released next week, running one month behind schedule.

In a petition in which the Madras high court directed the Bar Council of India (BCI) not to enrol lawyers who were in the civil service, and to conduct more stringent pre-enrolment checks of law graduates older than 40, to ensure they went to a proper law college rather than having obtained a mail order degree.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) has not satisfactorily complied with the Right to Information Act 2005 (RTI Act) provision which requires that it publish all its affairs on its website, held the Central Information Commission (CIC). The CIC said it is inclined to impose maximum penalty on the BCI if it doesn’t comply in a definite amount of time.

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.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) will file a resolution in the Supreme Court, defending its Certificate and Place of Practice (Verification) Rules 2015 by stating that “downfall” in the standards of bar association representatives was a result of increase in the number of fake lawyers, reported the Times of India.

The Supreme Court is hearing a batch of transfer petitions challenging the validity of the 2015 rules that make it mandatory for all lawyers enrolled after 1976 to re-enrol after submitting all their academic certificates.

The BCI submitted in court that lawyers in states like UP, Bihar, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Delhi, West Bengal and others were not inclined to furnish their certificates as they found it inconvenient.

The resolution, which the regulator passed internally recently and will now file as affidavit in the Supreme Court states:

“BCI members have expressed suspicion that a very strong racket is actively involved throughout the country in selling forged/fake certificates of matriculation, graduation and LLB,""downfall in standard of representatives of the...bar associations is a result of an increase of such fake/non-practising persons”.

The BCI has not published statistics for the number of All India Bar Exam (AIBE) candidates who passed the exam, for the last 4 years, and has failed to control the mushrooming of law schools.

These measures have resulted in a lack of transparency on the total number of advocates in India who have a right to practice before its courts.

Bar Council of India (BCI) member S Prabhakaran and 11 other Madras advocates are now senior advocates in the Madras high court, reported the Times of India.

NL Rajah, R Vaigai, Sathish Parasaran, A Sirajudeen, Isaac Mohanlal, R Singaravelan, TP Manoharan, Veera Kathiravan, Karthik, Anand and Xavier Arulraj are the other new senior advocates part of this round of designations in the high court.

This is the first batch of senior designations affected under the new senior designation norms that exist since 2013. Before 2013, advocates could simply nominate themselves for their own designation and if two-thirds of the full court of judges voted in favour of such nomination, the designation was complete. Under the new norms, only advocates who are invited to nominated themselves for the designation, are eligible to apply.

Additionally, only those advocates can be invited who have at least Rs 7 lakh as income tax returns for three previous financial years and publication of a minimum of 15 judgments in reputed law journals.

After this round, the Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry will have 122 senior advocates on its rolls, according to a statement by the state bar council’s chairman D Selvam to TOI

The All India Bar Exam (AIBE) challenges will be heard by a Supreme Court constitution bench next month.

One of the petitioners in the All India Bar Exam (AIBE) constitutional mega-challenge currently in the Supreme Court, due to be heard on Friday (18 March), will raise the question of irregularities in the Bar Council of India’s (BCI) appointment of private contractor ITES Horizon Pvt Ltd to conduct the AIBE in 2010.

Sunday’s All India Bar Exam’s (AIBE-IX) results will be released tentatively before 15 April, the Bar Council of India (BCI) notified on its website today.

Senior advocate KK Venugopal was appointed a friend of the court in the 13-petition challenge to the Bar Council of India’s All India Bar Examination (AIBE) listed today, before a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court.

After a meeting between the Bar Council of India (BCI) and the law ministry on the subject of the entry of foreign law firms.

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 Supreme Court was urged today to initiate contempt of court proceedings against three lawyers who were caught in an India Today sting operation claiming that they had beaten JNU Students Union president Kanhaiya Kumar for three hours in police custody and would inflict more harm on him.

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 councils are the only remaining speed bump in the government liberalising legal services, the law ministry secretary responsible for implementing the entry of foreign law firms said today.

An American Bar Association (ABA) source told Legally India that the ABA president Paulette Brown had met with the law minister yesterday and talked about liberalisation.

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.