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The gloves come off as foreign lawyers face a legal battle in Chennai

Foreign lawyers who thought the worst of the “quit India” campaign against them was over were in for a surprise last month. A young lawyer from south India filed a writ against 30 international law firms and a legal process outsourcing (LPO) firm alleging they were practising law in the country.

This writ petition of 18 March to the Madras High Court comes just as the controversy surrounding the Lawyers Collective case against foreign firms Ashurst, White & Case and Chadbourne & Parke has died down. In the petition a Bangalore University graduate and advocate with the Bar Council of Tamil Nadu, 30-year-old AK Balaji, stresses the need for the Indian courts to clamp down on “foreign law firms or foreign lawyers who are illegally practising the profession of law in India”. Resurrecting the movement against foreign law firms he urges the court to “prohibit them from having any legal practice either on the litigation side or in the field of non-litigation and commercial transactions in any manner within the territory of India”.

This is not the first time Balaji has alerted authorities to apparent contraventions of the Advocates Act, 1961. On 18 January 2010 the Association of Indian Lawyers, of which Balaji is a member, took their case to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Bar Council of India, the Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and a number of government bodies including the law, finance and income tax departments. In the latest petition, Balaji alleges that the authorities failed to take appropriate action against the violating firms, labelling them “mute spectators”. He further states that the absence of an order restraining foreign law firms from practising in India will result in “grave prejudice an irreparable loss and injury” to Indian legal professionals.

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