Bar Council of India (BCI)

The Bar Council of India (BCI) will engage a public relations (PR) consultancy and passed a resolution to agitate against the Human Resource Development ministry’s move to take away legal education, which the BCI said was “stealthily trying invite foreign firms”.

Graduates sitting for the 2012 All India Bar Exam (AIBE) were greeted on Sunday with a tough question paper, as the Bar Council of India (BCI) has said it would slowly increase the standard.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) Trust has changed its golden jubilee mooting festival plans, clarifying this week that out of the three planned moots in collaboration with Nirma University, NLU Delhi and NLU Jodhpur, the latter has been cancelled by the host university.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) has extended the deadline to register for the third All India Bar Exam (AIBE) from 7 to 15 December, despite claiming a “substantial number of applications”.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) Trust announced that it would conduct three BCI moots this season in collaboration with Institute of Law, Nirma University, NLU Jodhpur and NLU Delhi respectively.

Mint - easily India’s best quality business daily - will now feature cutting-edge legal industry news and analysis in its pages every second Friday under an exclusive new content partnership with Legally India.

In today’s Mint edition, Legally India editor Kian Ganz’s colum demystifies India’s legal market: Despite India’s fairly average legal population density every lawyer here has to make do with only $1.4m of GDP. This, it turns out, is the lowest figure in both developed and developing legal markets. Click here to read the column on this, pseudo lawyers and more.

Please comment below or on Mint with suggestions for future topics or stories worth covering.

Also in today’s Mint: all-new research on salary progression at law firms, as well as how and why law firm salaries have risen so much in the last five years.

Legally India editor Kian Ganz will now blog regularly in The Lawyer magazine’s new blogs section about the Indian legal landscape. Here is the first post.

By far the personal question that I get asked the most by lawyers in India and abroad is: “Why India?” You might want to ask A&O, CC, Links or Freshfields or the rest of the pack the same question.

Graduates who passed the July 2011 All India Bar Exam (AIBE) can collect their practising certificates, which now includes photographs, from state bar council offices from 25 October, said the Bar Council of India (BCI) in a press release yesterday.

The All India Bar Exam (AIBE) will be held on 8 January 2012, after the Bar Council of India (BCI) had originally scheduled the exam for December 2011 in its 4 September 2011 resolution.

Last week British lawyers made a push for India again with Lord Chancellor and justice secretary Ken Clarke turning up with entourage and rekindling the liberalisation talks that had become a little tepid of late. But are they following the right strategy?

Exclusive interview: Following a high-powered UK delegation’s meeting with the Indian law minister and the Bar Council of India (BCI), ex-Allen & Overy (A&O) partner and current Law Society of England & Wales president John Wotton says he is optimistic about the progress of Indian legal market liberalisation.

He is not the first foreign lawyer to have felt that way.

Yesterday’s closed-door afternoon meeting between UK justice secretary Kenneth Clarke, Indian law minister Salman Kursheed and Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Ashok Parija stopped short of reaching an agreement on the entry of foreign law firms but the countries would trial cooperation on the legal education front for the next six months.

Exclusive: The Bar Council of India has scheduled the next All India Bar Exam (AIBE) for December 2011 but acknowledging “practical difficulties” will allow graduates to practice in courts if they give an affidavit to pass the AIBE in December.

The Bar Council of India’s (BCI) counter-affidavit filed in the AK Balaji Chennai case against 31 foreign law firms said that the BCI has decided not to relax the restrictions prohibiting foreign lawyers from practising and that the issue raised by the writ was “no longer res integra” because it had been settled in the 2009 Lawyers Collective case.

Legally India understands that the BCI’s thinking is that internal disparities at the Indian bar need to be eradicated through reform before making any decision on foreign firms.

Only 69 per cent of 11,752 bar exam test takers managed to clear the second All India Bar Exam (AIBE), as only 56 per cent of those re-taking the test for the second time managed to clear.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) has elected a new chairman and vice chairman after solicitor general Gopal Subramanium resigned as solicitor general, according to Law et al. News.

On the day of the second All India Bar Exam (AIBE) today PTI reported at least 500 lawyers protested outside one of two exam halls in Chennai, where the first exam in March had to be cancelled due to unrest.

Mumbai, exhibiting that clichéd resilience much loved by commentators, continued with its business despite taking shocks and wild media rumours that would dent the spirits of many other cities. While the financial capital continues to live, the legal profession faced its own share of shocks: one new Anglo-Indian best friendship, a new law minister and the loss of its solicitor general and probably also the Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman.

The government has accepted solicitor general Gopal Subramanium’s resignation yesterday. Subramanium’s continuing chairmanship of the Bar Council of India (BCI) remains uncertain.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) said today that over 13,000 candidates applied to take the second All India Bar Exam (AIBE), which is set to take place on 24 July after it was postponed by a month in May.