The Bar Council of India (BCI) has published and gazetted its amended Certificate of Practice Rules, doing away with a minimum experience requirement before being allowed into higher courts, but retaining its earlier proposed system of requiring advocates to regularly renew their certificates of practice, reported Bar & Bench.
Under the new rules, all advocates except for senior counsel and Supreme Court advocates-on-record (AOR), have to complete the verification form within six months of 13 January 2015, before receiving their certificates of practice, which will be obligatory for practice.
This certificate will have to get renewed every five years, with the payment due reduced from Rs 500 to Rs 100.
According to Bar & Bench, BCI Chairman Manan Kumar Mishra claimed that the recently abandoned requirement for advocates to have a minimum of five years of lower-court experience before practising in the Supreme Court, actually followed a “suggestion” that had come from apex court judges.
In the objects to the new rules, extracted from the minutes of a meeting of the BCI from 30 November, the BCI had stated that “sadly, this profession has fallen under a cloud” and that the bar was “subject to manipulation and influence from extraneous powers”.
It noted that the “trend of advocates switching over to other pfoessions/services/business without any information to the State Bar Council has reached alarming proportions”, and was “endangering the legal proefssion as a whole” and “made a dent in its sanctity and standards”.
Amended Bar Council of India (BCI) Certificate and Place of Practice Verification Rules 2015 by legallyindia
Comments
2. Does this mean that all advocates MUST join a Bar Association?
Secondly the new rules has categorized advocates into two categories such as practicing and non practicing advocates, and according to the rules an advocate is considered a practicing advocate only if he/she shows that he/she has filed vakalathnama in a Case before any court/Tribunal. If an advocate has not filed vakalatnama in a given year in any case he/she will be considered a non practicing advocate. The new rules it seems does not take into account the fact that in many firms and offices many advocates appear in many cases throughout the year but they would not have filed vakalathnama in any of the case further non AOR's in Supreme Court are also at risk of being included in the name of non practicing advocates because of this rule
More ever if someones right to practice is taken off for non continuity what will be the fate of his existing clients.
I thing who framed rules for BCI may not have idea of court practice. By political patronage they came to hold the office of BCI. So ridiculous…