The Insiders Part I: The Office of Attorney General Goolam E Vahanvati

“The Insiders” is a three-part series on the law officers of the Central government, more specifically the offices of the Attorney General, the Solicitor General and an Additional Solicitor General. The first in the series is a profile of Attorney General Goolam Vahanvati’s office..Ambling down the corridors of the Supreme Court on a Miscellaneous morning, I spot the Attorney General (AG), Solicitor General (SG) and Additional Solicitor Generals (ASG) and their juniors rushing from court to court. It is a sight all too common..These law officers have been serving the Central government in what has arguably been one of the toughest phases for a Union government. And if there is a change in the government at the Centre, they are likely to resign in a few months time. After penning a critique on the functioning of the law officers in the Coal scam and the Iron ore mining case some time back, I decided to take a peek into the world of law officers and their associate lawyers..Along with Bar & Bench’s Pallavi Saluja, I spoke to the lawyers working in the offices of AG Goolam Vahanvati, SG Mohan Parasaran and ASG Nageswara Rao. The topics of discussion were wide and free ranging, from work timings and allocation of briefs to public interest litigations (PILs)..Attorney General Goolam Vahanvati.Currently working out of an office located at 10, Motilal Marg within walking distance from the Taj Mahal Hotel, AG Goolam E Vahanvati will soon be completing a decade as a law officer for the Union government. He was appointed SG in 2004, an office which he held until 2009 when he was appointed the AG. He had also served as the Advocate General of Maharashtra for 5 years before his stint with the Central government. The first thing that you notice when you step into his office is a Ping Pong table in the juniors’ wing of the office..The AG currently has six juniors in his office. Anoopam N Prasad, who has been working with the AG since July 2010, tells us more about this and the AG’s office..On his decision to join a law officer, he says that, “It was more of a decision to join him than it was to join a law officer. I had heard a lot about how he worked from people in Bombay. From what I heard, his work methods were very comprehensive and he was known to be a good lawyer.”.Allotment of work.Briefs to the AG’s office are marked directly from the Central Agency. The Central Agency section has three Panels of advocates apart from the law officers – Panels A, B and C. Juniors of most law officers are on the Central Government Panel. For each case, the Agency issues a docket which contains details of the case along with the law officer involved. Each case will also be marked to two briefing advocates from one of the Panels. Important matters are sometimes marked to two law officers and three to four briefing advocates..Regarding allotment of work to the lawyers in AG’s office, Anoopam says, “If it is a Central Agency case, then it comes directly marked from the Agency. In that case, the Central Agency assigns it to any junior who is on the Panel. At times, on a particular case, if one of the juniors, who is assisting the AG is on the Panel, he/she receives a docket from the Central Agency.”.“Many of us are on the Panel”, says Anoopam. A lawyer who is on the Panel can be marked a brief with any law officer and not just the AG. So a junior in the AG’s office could end up briefing and working with the SG or any of the ASGs. Similarly, juniors of other law officers routinely brief the AG. However, Anoopam points out that, “The Central Agency usually likes to have at least one of the AG’s juniors on the docket. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, this is what happens. Because it is obviously easier to co-ordinate if one of your juniors is working with you in the case. We (juniors on the Panel) get a lot of Central Agency drafting also, which has nothing to do with the AG.”.The AG does a lot of Constitutional and contract matters. He also gets a lot of opinion work from the government and Public Sector Units (PSUs). Work in the AG’s office starts early and finishes early. “Barring some huge matters, we start by about 9 in the morning and we are done by about 7.30 to 8 in the evening. We work on weekends.”.Other law officers and interacting with the government.The degree of supervision that the AG exercises over the other law officers is very limited and ends when a matter is allotted to a particular ASG. “He does not interfere in their work, how and what they argue and in their methods.”.Anoopam is, however, not ready to blame anyone for last minute briefs, a perpetual problem faced by all law officers. He says, “That is how the Central Agency works. It is a cyclical issue for which you can blame nobody. Somebody has to change it. But the problem is there are so many Ministries, so many matters, so many briefs that you cannot avoid getting last minute briefs. It is a reality of working with the government. None of us likes getting briefs the last minute but you have to live with it.”.He is also thankful that he was able to work on important matters. “I have done a few important matters. I drafted the S. 377 review petition along with a colleague, and the RTI review. Those are opportunities that you don’t often get. You have to be thankful for the fact that you can do that sort of work that actually makes a bit of a difference. The exposure has been great. If you are working with the AG, obviously you don’t get to argue in the matters in which he is appearing. Even in other Panel matters, only if the ASG does not appear and the other advocate is not there, then you get a chance. Ideally, the government would like the ASG or the concerned law officer or the senior Panel counsel to appear. But if that does not happen, sometimes we get a chance.”.Working in the AG’s office.About the work culture, Anoopam says that everybody gets along very well due to the fact that everyone works within clearly demarcated spheres. In fact, he says that one of the first instructions the AG had given him was that, “In this office, you are only concerned with what you do. Do not ever look over someone else’s shoulders. It is not of your interest what someone else is doing. Unless I have asked you to work with someone, you mind your brief, they will mind their brief.”.Regarding the challenges faced by the AG while defending the government, Anoopam admits that, “It has been a very challenging period. Let us just say it has been a hectic phase for the government. There are a lot of PILs being filed nowadays – some of them are genuine, some of them are not. Being the highest law officer in the country, the government wants him to appear more often than not. So, the pressure on him has been intense.”.However, he is quick to add that the AG has really coped well with the increased pressure. “Many people would buckle under but he does not. That is also because he prepares his briefs really well. He reads his briefs cover to cover.”.When asked whether law officers have discussed the observations of the Supreme Court regarding the government filing frivolous appeals, Anoopam offers a different point of view: “The problem is there are some matters which in our view deserve to be appealed against. Maybe in the view of the Supreme Court, they don’t deserve to be. The Supreme Court can say ‘These appeals are frivolous” but in the view of the government it is not so. It is a difference of opinion that will not be resolved.”.Of course, he says that law officers do discuss this issue. “It is not like they don’t discuss it…. The law officers do discuss this issue as and when they meet.”.When it comes to working with the AG, Anoopam is all praise for his senior, “He is a fantastic person to work with. I have been here for four years and I have not regretted my decision [to join him] one day. I probably would stick on after his term is over. He is very patient with [his] juniors and does not lose his temper unless one of us really messes up badly in which case you deserve to be ticked off. But if you don’t know something or understand something, he patiently explains it to you. So he actually takes time to explain concepts and principles of law to juniors.”.He says that Vahanvati is very thorough and clinical with his briefs. “If there is a big matter that he knows is coming in a month, he will assign it to us 3 weeks in advance and in the meanwhile he will read it himself. Then when we sit with him, he will tell us, ‘These are the broad issues I want you to work on.’ And we make our submissions on that. Then those submissions will get worked on about five times till he has made sure that it is absolutely perfect..Sometimes it is us who are worried when we are briefing him because he will catch out something which we don’t know. So we have to be thorough. He has a razor sharp memory. In the middle of a briefing, he will say, ‘Take out so-and-so case from 1918, this lawyer appeared, that person was the judge.’ And I will take half an hour to find the case. Not just Supreme Court cases, he quotes cases from the Bombay High Court that he argued 20 or 30 years ago.”.The AG pays his juniors a retainer fee in his private capacity. Also those juniors who are on the Panel get a fixed amount of fees for every case marked to them as an empanelled lawyer. Besides, the juniors are free to take up their own private matters as well..Anoopam recounts the story behind the Table Tennis table: “Once we had gone on a trip with him. One of the other juniors, Nishant and I used to play Table Tennis every day during the trip. So he said, ‘This is a very good idea, let us get one for the office.’ We thought that he was joking and he will forget about it. But the first thing he did when he got back is to arrange for a TT table for the office. He is interested himself and plays very well. At the end of a long day, an hour of table tennis is a good stress buster.”.Anoopam has no doubts when asked whether he would continue with Vahanvati after he steps down as the AG. “Yes, the work we are doing now, we will stop doing in 2 months. It is up to him. If he would like me to continue with him, I will. It has been a great run for 4 years. I have been here for 4 years and I can safely say that he is a fantastic boss to work with.”.(The next article in this series is a profile of Solicitor General Mohan Parasaran’s office.)