Liberalisation of Indian Legal Services: Politics and Challenges

Abstract

In recent years, many developing countries including India have integrated with the world economy in order to promote economic growth, development and poverty reduction. In the 1990s, India opened up its economy and liberalised its trade as part of its economic reforms and structural adjustment programmes and, since then, its GDP growth has accelerated significantly. India has today become one of the fastest growing economies of the world and has attracted large inflows of foreign capital. Since trade liberalisation, one of the industries that has shown huge potential and growth is the service industry, which contributes significantly (around 58 per cent in 2007–2008) to India’s GDP.1 However, in the wake of all these developments and in the era of globalisation, it is interesting to note that there is one service industry in India that is extremely reluctant to adapt to this changing world; the legal services market. Undeniably, the demand for India’s legal services is growing rapidly with the growing trend of many foreign and multinational companies investing in India and many Indian companies entering into cross-border transactions with foreign companies.2 Of course, this has meant that the pressure on the Indian government to open its lucrative legal services market to foreign law firms has mounted. In the past few years, this pressure appears to be increasing rapidly with frequent visits by different trade delegations organised by the professional bodies of various commonwealth countries, especially the Law Society of England and Wales, to