A lady advocate, who is a friend, was waiting for an auto rickshaw outside her housing society’s gate.
Another resident, an elderly lady doctor, joined her a bit later.
She too needed a rickshaw as her driver had not turned up.
The doctor noticed that the advocate had a cold and inquired about what she was taking for it.
My friend told her that she was taking Crocin.
The doctor shook her head, asked my friend to hold her bag, pulled out her letterhead and wrote out a prescription for my friend.
My friend was very pleased by this gesture, thanked the doctor profusely and offered her the first rickshaw which trundled along after a long wait.
The doctor gratefully boarded the rickshaw, thanked my friend and just as the driver was ready to move told my friend: “You can pay me my consultation charges in the evening.”
My friend was taken aback but before she could react the doctor said: “For you, it will be just ₹1,000” and she signalled the auto rickshaw driver to start.
My friend had to wait for ten more minutes to get another rickshaw.
***
When my friend narrated this incident to me, I was reminded of an incident in 1987 when my senior had engaged a well-known senior advocate as a counsel in one matter.
We were waiting outside the courtroom for our matter to come up.
My senior was chatting with the senior counsel and I was listening in.
Our safari-attired client, who was a director of a big bank, came and stood next to us.
Soon, he started talking to the counsel directly and queried him about some personal family disputes seeking his advice and opinion.
The counsel heard him and gave him some sound practical advice with which our client seemed pleased.
Then our matter got called out and we all rushed inside the courtroom.
That day our case got adjourned for some reason.
The very same evening, the counsel’s private peon landed at our office with a ‘memo of fees’ for “today’s conference in the corridor outside courtroom 43”.
The amount billed was ₹15,000, a big sum in 1987.
My senior paid it off and collected it from the client who understandably was peeved.
But in all subsequent hearings he stayed at least ten feet away from that designated senior advocate.
I was given the job of explaining to the client that this was “the normal practice” on the original side!
***
I must confess that I have still not been able to come to terms with some things which are accepted as ‘the normal practice’.
Let me cite just one example.
A very famous counsel in the Bombay High Court commands a whopping fee per appearance.
He sometimes argues matters and gets favourable Orders with his eyes closed.
His attorneys and clients also pay him whatever he demands with their eyes closed.
Once, this senior advocate was waiting in a courtroom for a matter to come up.
The team of the attorneys and their juniors who had briefed him were standing respectfully behind him.
Suddenly a person came rushing in, went up to the counsel and whispered something in his ear.
The counsel hurriedly got up and rushed out of the court with the words, “My matter is reaching elsewhere”.
The distraught attorneys waited in vain for the counsel to return.
Their matter was called out and as the counsel was not available and the judge was in no mood to move it to later in the day to accommodate the counsel, it was adjourned to another date.
A junior from the attorney’s firm was assigned the job of finding where the counsel had gone and informing him of the next date.
As he was moving from courtroom to courtroom in search of that counsel, the counsel himself emerged from one of them.
“What happened?” he asked the junior.
“Sir, since you were not there, we sought and got an adjournment,” the harried junior replied.
“Alright. Send someone to collect the docket and let me know a day before the next date,” the senior advocate replied.
In the evening, the docket came back marked 15,000 GMS.
That works out to ₹7,50,000!
That was what the counsel charged at that time “per appearance”.
A few days later, I bumped into a senior partner of the attorney’s firm which had briefed that counsel and asked the question that had been on my mind:
“How can he mark his full fee when he had actually disappeared just before the matter was called out? After all, it was due to his absence that the matter had been adjourned!”
The senior partner explained that since they had mentioned the counsel’s name to the Bench and taken the date, the counsel was “entitled” to mark his full fee.
It seems that was ‘the normal practice’ on the original side.
I then realised what was ‘original’ about this side when compared to the other side I had been more familiar with, viz. the appellate side.
I realised that the original side counsel could mark not just ‘per appearance’ but ‘per disappearance’ too!
They were invariably paid without any questions being asked irrespective of the outcome.
The appellate side counsel, on the other hand, often did not get paid even after appearing and arguing … if the result was not in favour of their client.
The client, more often than not, just disappeared.
For them, that was the ‘normal practice’!
