Not All Who Wear Black Coats and Bands Are Lawyers

When you are going next time to engage a lawyer for your case, ensure that his or her credentials are unquestionable as more than a million of them wearing black coats and white bands are in the profession with fake and forged degrees.

But it is very difficult to identify them as there is no set procedure to verify them. Only your own instincts and querying them on laws and court procedures and process would help you find out an imposter lawyer.

But more chances are that you will fall into their traps and end up paying thousands of rupees and losing your cases as well. Even the Bar Council of India (BCI), that is mandated to gatekeep entry to the bar, has not been able to winnow them out even after a decade. It is beyond their capacity as there is a vicious circle of law colleges, universities and certificate merchants who are making millions of money out of this industry as are the engineering, medical and other such institutes.

When a law graduate approaches BCI for registration and licence, the regulatory body processes it provisionally on the basis of the documents he or she submits before it.

Even the All-India Bar Examination, which finally makes a law graduate a lawyer if he gets through it, has failed to filter them out.

Lawyers with fake and forged degrees have acquired a very high proportion in the profession. According to the BCI upto 20 percent lawyers across the country are practising without valid degrees, which translates into jaw-dropping figures of 15 lakh lawyers. BCI has been in the works of eliminating the fake lawyers for the past one decade but the extent of fraud is so pervasive that it still has to go a way to clean the Augean Stables. 

State Bar Councils were found lax in following the verification protocols for which they were pulled up by the BCI. “Post enrollment verification of lawyers has not made a desired impact so far. Being an apex body to regulate the integrity of the profession, the BCI should take more positive steps to prevent registration of fake lawyers as well as to maintain the quality of the profession,” says Senior Advocate of the Delhi High Court K.C. Mittal.

Besides, law colleges and universities granting law degrees are alleged to be unwilling to participate in the verification process. Recognised and deemed universities issue law degrees in violation of the BCI norms. They are turning the legal profession into a commercial transaction, lawyers say. The Supreme Court recently faced a bizarre case of a fake lawyer. It found that it was taken down the garden path by a lawyer in a land dispute case from Muzaffarpur in Bihar.

The lawyer from the land of Natwarlal deceived the Apex Court and got a favourable judgement submitting that a settlement had been reached between the parties to the dispute. On his submission, the Court quashed the trial and Patna High Court orders in the matter. But five months after the judgement, the case returned to haunt the Apex Court when the real party appeared before the Court and submitted that no settlement had been struck and nor had he engaged any lawyer to represent him.

The lawyer, who claimed to have the power of attorney to represent the real respondent, was found to be a fake one. He had stolen the identity of a lawyer who had stopped practicing and cheated the Apex Court. The order of the day when the settlement agreement was filed mentioned appearances by four lawyers on behalf of the fake respondent. The fake lawyer resorted to a ruse to prevent the real respondent from approaching the Court: he filed a caveat to prevent him from appearing in the Court on issuing of a notice to the real respondent who would have appeared before it.

The real respondent got to know of the fraud by chance: he stumbled upon it on the Supreme Court website and rushed to Court. Two of the lawyers whose names were mentioned in the order as appearing for the fake respondent– father-daughter duo– expressed surprise over it. “The petitioner has not only acted in violation of the legal and ethical norms but has also committed a fraud upon the court, which, if not rectified, will embolden such malafide litigants to continue their deceitful practices, " counsel for the real respondent said.

The Court withdrew the earlier order and issued a direction for a probe into the matter.

BCI says that the bulk of such lawyers falls in the category of fake degree holders. “There are too many fake degrees, forged academic certificates, falsified qualifications and fraudulent enrollments,” BCI says.

The issue hit the headlines in 2015 when the Bar Council of Delhi found that Delhi Law Minister Jitender Singh Tomar had a fake law degree which he claimed had obtained from the Tilka Manjhi University in Bihar. The Delhi police arrested him after a probe on an FIR by the Council. His registration was cancelled and he had to resign from the Delhi cabinet. But the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) did not expel him. Rather, his wife was awarded with a ticket in the 2020 Assembly election.

It has been a decade since then but the rot continued to grow with stink all around. It is said that there are thousands of fake lawyers practising in Delhi, what to talk of the state of affairs in the States. Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Rajendra Prasad and their ilks must be squirming in their celestial abode hearing the nadir their profession has touched in the country. Advocacy is considered to be a noble profession but black sheep among them have tarnished its image to the point that people paint all of them with the same brush: weevils getting grinded with wheat in the flour mill. 

It is the time that the leaders in the profession took up the issue by both horns and solved it once and for all. There are other issues, including the exorbitant fees Advocates charge making justice inaccessible to millions of people, but these are issues which are best left to them to be addressed.