Foreign Legal Firms Will Bring Expertise

MINDSPEAK: Anand Prasad, Partner, Trilegal

The common citizen of this country will not be affected if legal profession is opened up for foreign competitors as foreign firms will not take into account the common man with his limited paying capacity.

The people will continue to do business with their current service providers: domestic lawyers.

For Indian business, there will be short-term benefits. For example, we are witnessing increased private sector investments in infrastructure now.

Until ten years ago, this was a state monopoly. As a result, we do not have ample legal expertise in doing infrastructure contracts.

But law firms in the west have a long history of doing this kind of work. If the sector is opened up, this super-specialisation can be brought to India which will benefit Indian business people.

 

It will also help those businessmen who are planning to go global. When it comes to raising capital from an international lending agency, it helps to have somebody from an international law firm sitting next to you.

There are long-term benefits too. There will be better trained legal professionals, which will be good for the citizens as well as the corporates.

As the size of the domestic market cannot sustain a law firm full of high- cost expatriates, these firms will be manned largely by Indians.

Many of the Indian lawyers trained by the multinationals will break away and set up low-cost operations of their own with the same quality of services.

Opening up of the legal sector will also lead to an improvement in service ethics. As of now, there is a tendency among lawyers to prolong litigation for personal benefits.

The bulk of domestic lawyers are litigators who are opposed to the demand of foreign firms to open up Indian transactional practice. They want reciprocity -- foreign countries should liberalise their litigation practice to Indian lawyers.

Though overseas firms do not have much experience in transactional work, Indians have long exposure to litigation