A decade-and-a-half-long court case on the fate of foreign law firms with liaison offices in India has finally been concluded. In the case of Lawyers Collective v Bar Council of India et al, Bombay High Court decided on 15 December that India’s central bank should not have permitted White & Case, Ashurst and Chadbourne & Parke to open offices in India, since all lawyers in the country are required to be members of its bar councils.
“There’s no reason to hold that in India the practice in non-litigious matters is unregulated,” said chief justice Swatanter Kumar and justice JP Devadhar in their 39-page ruling, making concrete a 1995 interim decision.
The dispute dates back to the mid-1990s when licences to open liaison offices were granted to the three foreign law firms during a short-lived experiment with liberalization. Pressure group Lawyers Collective challenged the licences in court, arguing that the Legal Advocates Act, 1961, prohibits any foreign lawyer from practising in India.
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