Banks Cannot Be Judge, Jury, and Executioner of a Lawyer's Career — Supreme Court Draws the Line
By Squirrels·
What Happened to Ajay Vijh
Ajay Vijh was a panel advocate for Syndicate Bank (now Canara Bank). His job: prepare search and title reports for immovable properties offered as loan security. The bank alleged that Vijh helped a borrower defraud the bank by committing negligence in one such report — a title verification that allegedly enabled a fraudulent loan.
The bank's response was not to file a complaint with the Bar Council. It was not to initiate legal proceedings. It was to place Vijh's name on the Indian Banks' Association's "Caution List" — a database hosted on the IBA website and circulated to every member bank in India.
The consequences were immediate and devastating.
Other banks saw Vijh's name on the caution list and terminated his services as a panel advocate. His practice — built over years of bank-related legal work — collapsed. His income dried up. His professional reputation was destroyed.
And all of this happened, Vijh argued, without prior notice, without a hearing, and without any investigation into whether the fraud allegation was even substantiated.
What the Supreme Court Ruled
The bench of Justice PS Narasimha and Justice Alok Aradhe held that the IBA cannot blacklist lawyers through the caution list mechanism.
The ruling rests on a clear jurisdictional principle: under the Advocates Act, 1961, the Bar Council of India and the State Bar Councils have exclusive jurisdiction over disciplinary action against advocates. A banking association — however powerful, however aggrieved — does not have the authority to bypass this statutory framework and impose what amounts to a professional death sentence through an internal database.
Amicus Curiae Senior Advocate Maninder Singh supported this position, arguing that the caution list violates the petitioner's fundamental right to practice his profession. If a bank believes a lawyer has committed fraud or negligence, the proper course is to file a complaint with the Bar Council — not to unilaterally destroy the lawyer's livelihood through an industry-wide blacklist.
The court's implicit message: banks cannot be judge, jury, and executioner of a lawyer's career.
The National Legal Academy Directive
In a significant institutional direction, the court ordered the Bar Council of India to establish a National Legal Academy for Advocates — modelled on the National Judicial Academy (NJA) that provides continuing education for judges.
The directive acknowledges a gap: while judges have the NJA for professional development, ongoing training, and ethical education, advocates have no equivalent institutional framework. The National Legal Academy would "institutionalise the discipline and culture of continuing legal education" for the legal profession.
This is the court's constructive response to its own concern — expressed by Justice Narasimha during hearings — about the effectiveness of existing Bar Council mechanisms for addressing professional misconduct. If the Bar Council is the exclusive authority over lawyer discipline, the court is saying, then the Bar Council must build the institutional infrastructure to exercise that authority credibly.
The Accountability Gap Neither Side Addresses
The ruling is legally sound. Banks should not have the power to blacklist lawyers without due process. The Advocates Act's framework — complaint to Bar Council, inquiry, hearing, order — exists for precisely this purpose.
But the ruling raises a question it does not answer: is the Bar Council's disciplinary mechanism actually functional?
The Data on Bar Council Disciplinary Actions
The Bar Council of India oversees disciplinary proceedings for approximately 1.8 million enrolled advocates across India. State Bar Councils handle initial complaints and inquiries.
The documented problems:
Speed: Disciplinary proceedings before State Bar Councils routinely take 5–10 years to reach conclusion. Some cases have been pending for over a decade. A bank that has been defrauded and files a Bar Council complaint may wait years for any action.
Volume: The number of complaints filed vastly exceeds the institutional capacity to process them. State Bar Councils, many of which lack adequate staff, infrastructure, and funding, face backlogs that grow annually.
Enforcement: Even when the Bar Council finds misconduct and suspends or deregisters an advocate, enforcement is inconsistent. Cases of suspended advocates continuing to practice — sometimes in different jurisdictions — are documented.
Perception: Among the banking sector, the Bar Council's disciplinary process is widely perceived as slow, opaque, and professionally protective. This perception — whether fully justified or not — is precisely why the IBA created the caution list in the first place: because the formal mechanism was not delivering accountability at the speed or scale that the banking system required.
The Resulting Gap
The Supreme Court has said: banks cannot blacklist lawyers (no due process, no jurisdiction).
The Bar Council has exclusive jurisdiction — but its disciplinary mechanism is slow, under-resourced, and widely perceived as ineffective.
The lawyer who commits negligence sits in the gap between an institution that cannot act (IBA) and an institution that does not act quickly enough (BCI). The bank that has been defrauded waits. The clients who may be harmed by the same lawyer's future negligence are unprotected.
The National Legal Academy directive is a step toward closing this gap — but education and discipline are not the same thing. Training lawyers is one function. Holding them accountable when they fail is another.
What This Means for the Legal Profession
The ruling establishes three principles:
1. Jurisdictional boundary. Only the Bar Council can take disciplinary action against advocates. No other body — not banks, not corporate associations, not government agencies — can bypass this framework.
2. Due process requirement. Any action that affects an advocate's right to practice must follow the principles of natural justice: notice, hearing, reasoned order. An internal blacklist circulated without any of these protections is unconstitutional.
3. Institutional obligation. The Bar Council, as the exclusive disciplinary authority, must build the infrastructure to exercise that authority effectively. The National Legal Academy directive is the court's way of imposing this obligation.
For India's approximately 1.8 million advocates, the ruling provides protection against arbitrary professional harm. For the banking sector, it removes an enforcement tool without providing a faster alternative. For the Bar Council, it adds a mandate without (yet) adding the resources to fulfil it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can banks still remove lawyers from their panel?
The ruling does not prevent individual banks from choosing which lawyers to retain or remove from their panels. It prevents the IBA from circulating an industry-wide "caution list" that effectively blacklists a lawyer across the entire banking sector without due process.
What should banks do if they suspect a panel lawyer of fraud?
File a complaint with the relevant State Bar Council under the Advocates Act, 1961. The Bar Council has exclusive jurisdiction over disciplinary proceedings against advocates.
What is the National Legal Academy?
The Supreme Court directed the BCI to establish a National Legal Academy for Advocates, similar to the National Judicial Academy for judges, to provide continuing legal education and professional development.
The Bottom Line
The Supreme Court drew a clear line: the IBA's caution list was an extrajudicial mechanism that destroyed careers without due process. Banks cannot substitute themselves for the Bar Council. The ruling is correct on principle.
But the principle works only if the institution with exclusive jurisdiction — the Bar Council — can deliver accountability at a speed and scale that the legal profession and its clients require. A disciplinary mechanism that takes 5–10 years to resolve a complaint is not a mechanism. It is a queue.
The court has protected lawyers from banks. It has directed the BCI to build a National Legal Academy. The remaining question — who protects banks and clients from lawyers who commit negligence, in real time rather than after a decade of proceedings — is the gap the ruling identifies but does not close.