In a deeply unsettling clash between professional entitlement and a litigant's fundamental right to justice, the Kerala High Court has been compelled to confront one of the legal profession's most corrosive open secrets, an advocate weaponising the very proceedings he once championed to extract fee payments from his former clients. The case, filed under Article 226 of the Constitution before a single bench at the High Court, places under judicial scrutiny a troubling allegation: that a practicing advocate, after his engagement was terminated, orchestrated a sustained campaign to freeze execution proceedings in a decades-old land acquisition matter, denying rightful decree holders access to their own award money, until his fee dispute was resolved on his terms. What the Court ultimately finds cuts to the very soul of what it means to wear the black robe.
The controversy began in the corridors of a land acquisition reference dating back to 1988, where a group of claimants had fought long and hard to secure an award in their favour. The first petitioner, an advocate, claimed to have steered this litigation from 2004 onwards, eventually holding a vakalath in the execution proceedings from 2017. The arrangement, however, soured dramatically when, after the State Government deposited the first instalment of the award, a bitter dispute over fees erupted between the advocate and his clients.
The claimants alleged that they had already paid over Rs.25 lakh in documented bank transactions, and that it was only when the advocate began demanding an additional Rs.1 crore, threatening to take no further steps in the case unless paid, that they were left with no choice but to seek new counsel. When the claimants approached fresh advocates, respondents 1 and 2, who filed a new vakalath before the executing court without a No Objection Certificate, the first petitioner retaliated with a volley of complaints before the Chief Justice, the Bar Council, and the executing court itself, simultaneously filing an application to stay the execution proceedings entirely.
The petitioners then escalated to the High Court, seeking a declaration that the change of vakalath was invalid and demanding that all execution proceedings be kept in abeyance until their fee claim was adjudicated, effectively asking a constitutional court to do what no court ever should: hold a decree hostage to an advocate's billing dispute.
The Court was unsparing in its assessment, describing the petition's very premise as a "pernicious conduct" that had been "unabashedly brought up for determination" before a constitutional court, and systematically dismantled each plank of the petitioners' case. Citing the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in R.D. Saxena v. Balram Prasad Sharma, the bench reiterated that no advocate holds a lien over case proceedings or bundles, and that a litigant's right to change counsel must flow unimpeded, just as a patient must be free to change a doctor without the previous doctor withholding medical records. The Court was emphatic that Bar Council of India Rules permit an advocate, after termination of engagement, only to adjust unpaid fees from amounts already in his hands, nothing more. It was equally emphatic on what an advocate cannot do, "There cannot, under any circumstances whatsoever, be a situation where the litigant is pushed to a corner or blackmailed into paying the fee demanded by the Advocate."
What made the bench's rebuke sharper still was its observation that the petitioners had successfully stalled disbursement of the decretal amount to rightful claimants for nearly ten months through this litigation, a fact the Court called "quite disturbing." Finding the writ petition entirely without merit, the Court dismissed it with a cost of Rs.50,000, directed to be deposited with the Kerala State Legal Services Authority within six weeks.
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