The Supreme Court ruled in May 2024 that lawyers cannot be sued in consumer courts. While doctors face consumer forums under the 1995 Indian Medical Association ruling, the court said an advocate’s work is a personal service. Clients must now use civil courts or the Bar Council for legal grievances.
The bench refused to hear the matter in open court, holding that it did not meet the narrow bar set by Rupa Ashok Hurra v. Ashok Hurra, the 2002 ruling that created the curative petition as a last resort against gross miscarriage of justice. However, the order said absolutely nothing about whether the underlying rule is fair or not. Rather, it only said that the case did not clear a very procedural fence.
This small, technical fact might have closed the courtroom door on consumer recourse for grievances against lawyers, possibly for good.
Same argument, different outcomes
To understand this better, let’s go back to two rulings that, on paper, appear to answer the same question but somehow arrive at opposite answers.
In 1995, in Indian Medical Association v. V.P. Shantha, the Supreme Court held that a doctor treating a paying patient is providing a “service”, which means a patient who feels wronged can go to a consumer forum instead of a civil court.
Almost three decades later, in Bar of Indian Lawyers v. D.K. Gandhi (2024), the court took the opposite view for lawyers. An advocate’s work, it said, is a “contract of personal service”, which the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 specifically excludes from its definition of “service” under Section 2(42). A lawyer who loses your case badly can still be sued in an ordinary court or reported to the Bar Council, but not hauled before a consumer commission the way a doctor can.
What’s more, the court in its May 2024 judgment asked whether V.P. Shantha itself was correctly decided, and sent that question to a larger bench. That larger bench looked at it in November 2024 and declined to reopen it. So, this is not an old inconsistency nobody has looked at in years. It is a live one that the Supreme Court examined twice in six months and chose both times to leave standing.
It would be too easy to say that this asymmetry is simply wrong. The reasoning in D.K.Gandhi is not frivolous. An advocate is not just an agent carrying out a client’s instructions. She is also an officer of the court, with obligations to the judge and the opposing side that may conflict with what her client wants. No lawyer can promise a victory because the outcome depends on the facts, evidence and a judge. The profession has its own accountability machinery, from the Advocates Act to Bar Council disciplinary proceedings.
Except that almost every one of those arguments applies just as well to a doctor.
A surgeon cannot promise that an operation will go a certain way. Medicine has its own licensing bodies and disciplinary codes, just as law does. And a doctor’s obligations do not begin and end with what the paying patient wants either. Doctors are bound by medical ethics that require them to refuse a procedure a patient insists on, or to prioritise patients’ long-term wellbeing over what feels good to them in the moment.
If none of that stopped medical services from being brought within the ambit of consumer law in 1995, it is worth asking why the same reasoning does not apply to legal services.
Only legislation can help now
The most honest answer is a slightly uncomfortable one. There is no single, coherent test in Indian consumer law for deciding when a profession’s services should be treated as ordinary “service” and when they should not.
What exists instead is a set of rulings, decided decades apart and on different facts, which were never measured against a common yardstick. V.P. Shantha and D.K. Gandhi were each internally reasoned. They were never reconciled with each other. The 9 September dismissal missed an opportunity to fix that. And it also closed off one of the last avenues through which the issue might have been addressed.
This is not just a lawyers-versus-doctors problem. Architects, CAs, engineers and other professionals who exercise specialised judgement for a fee work in the same undefined space.
Every one of us, at some point, hires a professional to perform important services and pays for it out of our own pocket. It is worth knowing, before that transaction goes wrong, whether the law treats you as someone with recourse or someone without it. Right now, that answer depends less on a common principle than on how the courts happened to decide a case involving a particular profession.
With the judicial route now closed on this particular question, legislation could offer a resolution. Parliament should write into Section 2(42) a clear, profession-neutral standard for when specialised services attract consumer accountability, rather than leaving each profession to find out through its own decade of litigation where it stands.
Professor Dr Ashok R. Patil is Vice Chancellor of the National University of Study and Research in Law (NUSRL), Ranchi. Avinash Verma is a research assistant and student at NUSRL. Views are personal.