Reform in Practice: Siddarth Raman (The Professeer) on Deregulating the Legal Profession

What is one area of regulation in India that should be deregulated?

I'm going to be talking about the fact that the legal profession is highly regulated in this country, and there are some parts of it that the government could do deregulation on. I think about this in three fundamental ways. One is allowing more flexible pricing. The second is that lawyers should be allowed to advertise and market themselves and reduce the information asymmetry, as it goes.

The third is that you should allow for ideas like liability, legal funding, for litigation funding, as such. The first point is pricing. The government does not allow people to charge on success fees. Every other professional service, whether it's accounting, whether it's consulting, has seen this, that initially firms used to charge on inputs,  which is the number of hours billed or the number of sessions attended. If you're a lawyer representing somebody at the Supreme Court, if you're a very famous lawyer, irrespective of whether the hearing was successful or not, you're still getting charged a few lakhs.

The second tier is fixed price models, which have started appearing in corporate law firms that if you want a contract drafted, it's some kind of fixed price. I call these the inputs, the outputs, and then finally the outcomes, which is if you win, then you get paid on whether you recovered the money or not. We  see this, even though it's currently not allowed, we see this happening at the district court levels, whether for cases like motor accidents insurance claims, where the lawyer comes and tells you, hey, look, it doesn't matter. If you win, then you give me a cut of whatever amount I'm able to get for you, in which case the interests of the lawyer and the interests of the client are actually completely aligned.

I think they should be allowed to get to the levels of pricing that other industries have allowed, which is success fees.  That's one. The second one is that lawyers today are not allowed to advertise their success rates, so you really don't know whether the lawyer you're getting is good or bad. There is really no information on what kind of cases have they done, where have they won, where have they lost, and this information is really, really missing. You're really banking on the fact that somebody in your network knows a good lawyer, and you know of them by reputation, and it's all anecdotal.

I think this is a really bad system, and a large part of this is because the government says that the law is a noble  profession and doesn't allow them to advertise. The third one is that today, if you want to take on a big corporation, they are able to hire the best lawyers because they have the resources, whereas you are not able to hire really expensive lawyers. In the West, they do allow for litigation financing, which is that if you have a strong case, let's say there's been a hospital that you want to sue, and they have a large legal team, somebody will come and say, look, I think your case has merit.  I'm going to finance your claims, and if you win, then I will take a cut of the hearings.

I think this balances the power imbalance in this market, and it allows for greater participation in the legal system. Those are my three ideas that need to be deregulated for the legal profession.