Isha Singh*
Introduction
In 2015, an advocate gave a routine legal opinion verifying the title of a property offered as security for a bank loan. A decade later, that opinion robbed him of an entire industry. Without a hearing, without a formal complaint before any Bar Council, and without taking any steps to settle the complaint, and without ever being accused of fraud, his name was quietly entered into the Indian Banks’ Association’s “Caution List,” a jointly developed blacklist, which effectively prevented him from getting briefed by any bank in the country. It took a decade, the High Court’s refusal to intervene and, ultimately, the Supreme Court to right the wrong. But Ajay Vijh v. Indian Banks Association & Ors. (2026 INSC 670) does not end with one lawyer’s exoneration. It uncovers a far more uncomfortable truth: India’s legal profession has been quietly outsourcing its own discipline problem, as no one, even the profession itself, can now prove that the system, meant to solve the problem, works.
This piece contends that the Supreme Court’s command to BCI to conduct an audit of its own disciplinary actions is important but not enough. The audit provides a diagnosis, but does not produce a cure. If the audit is not followed by an enforceable, publicly visible reform, the informal “shadow regulation” which brought Ajay Vijh’s decade-long ordeal will keep just coming back in different forms.
When the Bar Looked Away, the Banks Built Their Own Court
In the year 2015, Canara Bank appointed an advocate to provide his opinion on a property which was put up as collateral for a loan exceeding Rs 2 crores. Several years later, the bank pointed out that his advice missed a defect in the title and, rather than approaching the relevant State Bar Council under the Advocates Act, 1961, the bank presented his name to the Indian Bank Association to be added to the caution list, which is an industry-wide caution list usually reserved for fraud. See Bar and Bench (7 July 2026): Banks cannot Blacklist Advocates by Putting Them on Caution List. The writ petition was dismissed by the Allahabad High Court on the ground that the IBA was not a “State” under Article 12 of the Constitution; therefore, not subject to judicial review under Article 226.
The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal. The court held that everybody, including a non-statutory body engaged in a public function, has to fall within the ambit of a writ under Article 226 as soon as its action clearly involves a public law element. The caution list directly infringed the fundamental right of Vijh guaranteed under Article 19(1)(g) of the Constitution of India, as it served as a sector-wide unfavourable accreditation process. As CaseCiter noted in its report on the ruling(7 July 2026): Can judicial review be applied to private bodies? Supreme Court answers.)
The Court’s Constitutional Corrective
The bench comprising Justice P.S. Narsimha and Alok Aradhe made a clear demarcation of powers. The Banks are free to terminate the empanelment of an advocate on a contractual basis and internally. However, the industry-wide “negligence” and “incompetence” cannot be placed on the lawyer by policy without first routing the allegation through the statutory disciplinary process under sections 35 and 36 of the Advocates Act, 1961.
This thought is not original, but rather a thought that is consistently traced back through the history of the Constitution. In Supreme Court Bar Association v. Union of India (1998), the Constitution Bench held that only the disciplinary committees constituted under the Advocates Act have exclusive jurisdiction to discipline an advocate for professional misconduct. The Supreme Court, acting under its contempt powers, could not circumvent that framework to suspend an advocate’s license. In the recent judgment of Bar of Indian Lawyers v. D.K.Gandhi(2024 INSC 410), the Court reiterated that the legal profession is sui generis, service-oriented, and cannot be separated from administration. Also, it is not subject to the regulation of consumer protection law as an ordinary trade. Ajay Vijh simply applies this well-settled principle to a new enemy, not an overreaching court and not a consumer forum, but a private banking consortium that had started to work as an unaccountable body that regulates the Bar outside the law.
Why an Audit Alone Will Not Rebuild Trust
After that, the court was interested in the underlying issue. In its own language, taken from reports, the bench noted that “there appears to be insufficient publicly available information regarding whether the existing mechanisms are achieving their intended objectives in practice”. The country’s apex court is admitting that the reason banks sought to go informal on the blacklist is that the formal channel of the Bar Council’s disciplinary process provides no outward evidence of having any effect.
This is substantiated by a review of the public disclosures made by the BCI. It has a page on disciplinary proceedings that has no published information about pendencies, disposal rates, or average timelines—none loosely comparable to the “number of complaints instituted annually” or “number of complaints disposed”. The court has now specifically directed the BCI to prepare a list of these as part of the audit.
This is where the audit, welcome though it is, can turn out to be a half measure. An audit is a diagnostic tool: it identifies where the disease is, but not how to treat it. If the BCI produces what the court has asked for and what practitioners know are chronic pendencies, great variations among the State Bar Councils, and zero transparency, all by itself doesn’t mean much for the next Ajay Vijh. The institutions will continue to rely on informal workarounds until the formal system becomes more visible and faster than the informal workarounds.
The Access-to-Justice Stakes
This opacity is not shared equally. A well-equipped professional advocate at a metropolitan bar can handle a slow, erratic discipline system; a client with genuine concern against an advocate of a smaller town cannot even find a proper forum to file a complaint, let alone follow up on a complaint, which is too much to expect. Those who have actual complaints against a lawyer simply do not have a quick and clear path to justice. Honest lawyers, however, remain in a cloud of suspicion for years, which is why banks and other institutions turn to informal blacklists rather than wait for the formal one, as Vijh’s decade-long battle demonstrates. In view of this, the issue of discipline of the Bar is not only an issue for advocates. But it directly relates to the constitutional guarantee of access to justice under Article 21, which has been extended to the gatekeepers of the justice system itself.
Lessons from Other Self-Regulators
The BCI is not the only organisation with credibility issues. There was a similar situation with the Securities and Exchange Board of India, and its response offers a useful comparison. The information on the investigation conducted and closed by SEBI, as well as the annual reports are made public from time to time to ensure that anyone can perform a review themselves and see what is being done, including the outcome of the investigations, without the need for a court order for a one-off review. That does not mean that a professional body like the Bar Council of India should create a model wholesale of a market regulator: the Bar’s independence from government control matters in a way that really is not an issue for SEBI. Still, as a general rule, people believe a self-regulator if it remains transparent at all times, not just when a court makes a discovery demand.
A Concrete Roadmap Before 31 August
The matter is listed for further directions on 31 August 2026, when the BCI is likely to report back on steps taken. Here are four concrete steps that would be more effective than a one-time report and would carry weight for the court in providing remedial actions.
Mandatory publication of disciplinary statistics
Every State Bar Council should be required to report and publish at regular intervals the number of complaints received, the number of complaints resolved, and the number of complaints pending which are beyond a prescribed time limit, which are exactly the numbers which the Court itself indicated the audit should focus upon.
Statutory timelines with automatic escalation
Currently, the Advocate Act provides no time limit on how long a complaint may remain on a State Bar Council’s agenda. A complaint may take a long time to get resolved, which means it becomes unimportant to the complainant and the advocate who is being complained against. Having a time frame after which the case is automatically moved up to the BCI, if no action is taken, would ensure that an audit results in change, not just a report.
An interim grievance-triage layer
Not all complaints require a complete trial. A simple first-level screening step would be able to effectively eliminate weak or frivolous complaints soon and fast, while those that are more substantive would be advanced to the next level more quickly. This would decrease the delay and pendency that concern the court without compromising due process for advocates.
Keeping competence-building distinct from discipline
The court also recommended the establishment of a National Legal Academy as well as formalising the continuing legal education akin to the National Judicial Academy. This is a good concept, but it addresses a different issue. Improving lawyers’ skills and disciplining their misbehaviour are two different problems, and the academy idea is not a solution to, nor an excuse for, the more difficult challenge of improving the disciplinary system.
This is not the first time that an attempt at reform has been made. The Supreme Court itself had made a reference in Mahipal Singh Rana v. State of U.P. (2016) calling for such accountability for advocates, and the Law Commission of India had recommended similar accountability measures in its 266th report (2017), which was later rejected as “draconian” by the BCI. But that past is a cautionary tale: without sustained pressure, this audit risks meeting the same fate.
Conclusion
At its core, self-regulation is not a right that the Bar enjoys just because it has always had it and should be kept as a matter of course. It is only entitled to remain if it proves more effective than the ad hoc informal system is capable of generating when it fails. The Ajay Vijh case is not about a single misguided and blacklisted lawyer getting his due. This is an alarming sign: if the formal disciplinary process remains ineffective and vague, then banks and other institutions will continue to find new ways of informally disciplining advocates despite repeated court rulings that make them illegal. The Supreme Court, to its credit, has pointed out clearly where the problem lies. It will only become obvious that a self-audit is enough to correct the problem when the case is brought back on 31 August 2026. Until then, though, it remains up to the Bar Council of India to demonstrate that real self-regulation, not a façade of independence, is the path to take in order to benefit the legal profession.
* The author is a student pursuing LL.M. at Maharashtra National Law University, Nagpur. The author may be contacted at ishasingh9529@gmail.com.
The research, the writing, the clarity… absolutely nailed it.👏❤️