Legal services and practice in India is passing
through a stage of metamorphism. The legal services in India are
still not open to foreign lawyers due to absence of mutual
understanding in this regard with various jurisdictions.
This also is logical as when Indian lawyers are not
permitted to practice in foreign jurisdictions there is no sense in
allowing foreign lawyers to practice in India as well.
With the recent interim order of the apex court of
India, legal
practice in India now exclusively belongs to Indian advocates.
This means that foreign
law firms, LPOs and chartered accountant (CA)/whole time company
secretary (CS) firms cannot provide legal services in India
anymore.
The terms legal services has been interpreted very
broadly by higher courts of India. Now even the apex court of India
has declared that legal service include both litigation based as well
as non litigation based services. This virtually covers all the legal
services in India and any person, organisation, foreign law firm,
CAs, CS, etc who are not enrolled with the concerned bar council and
actually practicing law would be engaging in illegal activity.
This would definitely benefit local players and
Indian
LPO service providers like Perry4Law
who would play a more pro active role in the LPO/KPO segment of
India.
In similar parallel development, legal
fraternity of India is getting serious but legal education is getting
worst. While the respective bar councils are playing a
good role in the development of legal education and legal standards
in India yet higher legal education in India is still suffering from
corruption
and bad educational standards.
The coming months would witness numerous actions in
this regard and only time would tell whether they would be useful or
harmful.
