New Delhi: Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on Saturday, November 19, insisted that senior lawyers should pay their juniors decent salaries and not treat them as “slave workers”.
“For far too long, we have regarded the youngsters in our profession as slave workers. Because that is how we grew up,” he said, adding that this is the “old ragging principle” in Delhi University.
“Those times were very different. But, also, so many lawyers who could have made it to the top, never made it because they had no resources,” LiveLaw reported him as saying.
He further said that the legal profession is an “old boys’ club”, where opportunities are given to only a selected group in a network.
“It is an old boys’ club. It is not merit-based. Are juniors paid decent salaries? All this must change, and the burden is on us, as seniors,” he said.
The CJI was addressing the audience at a function organised by the Bar Council of India.
He also shared a conversation he had with a friend when he was a student at the Faculty of Law, Delhi University, to highlight how this profession is viewed in terms of financial stability.
When he had said he would earn a living by practising law, his friend had advised, “Why don’t you get a gas agency or a retail oil dealership so that you will have sufficient means to sustain yourself?”
“This thought has never left me, because in so many ways, it reflects the truth about our profession,” the CJI said.
He highlighted the stark disparity in the profession and said, “While you have top-notch lawyers in the Supreme Court who would have seven or eight video-conferencing screens open so they could move from court to court with a flick of the mouse, yet you have lawyers, who had to virtually live from hand to mouth during the pandemic, when the courts were shut and the registrar’s court was not functioning.”
“The president [of the Supreme Court Bar Association] told us that [the registrar’s court] is what sustained the lives and livelihoods of the juniors because they would get somewhere between Rs 800 to Rs 1,000 to appear. This would enable them to sustain a family,”he added.
The registrar’s court, he said, deals with “very small procedural issues, like substitution of legal heirs, placing a matter before the chamber court”and “all the small things for which juniors run to that court”.
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Nearly a week ago, LiveLaw had asked former Chief Justice of India, Uday Umesh Lalit, for “advice to young lawyers who are overworked and underpaid”.
Acknowledging that it was a common grievance among young lawyers, he had asked them to “have patience, confidence, and belief in themselves” and they will be able to “turn the tide”.
The issue of paying junior advocates fairly also came up before a constitution bench hearing a batch of petitions challenging the validity of the All-India Bar Examination in September.
The Delhi high court had also appealed to senior lawyers to pay a “dignified stipend” to their juniors so that it is enough for them to overcome financial stress.
According to a Hindustan Times report published in May 2020, a survey by legal think-tank Vidhi had found that advocates with less than two years of legal practice at the Bar earn less than Rs 10,000 a month.
Around 80% of the surveyed advocates from the Delhi high court said the average monthly income in the first two years of practice for a lawyer could be between Rs 5,000 and Rs 20,000.
The eight high courts surveyed were Delhi, Allahabad, Bombay, Calcutta, Gujarat, Kerala, Madras and Patna.