CJI DY Chandrachud calls upon lawyers to pay juniors a dignified amount for long working hours

Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud on Saturday called upon lawyers across the country to pay their juniors well..Speaking at a function to commemorate the completion of 20 years of the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court, the Chief Justice said,“I would also like to re-agitate an issue faced by our legal fraternity. Remuneration paid to young lawyers by their seniors. At a personal level, I believe that senior members of the Bar must promote talent and help junior lawyers by giving them a dignified amount to sustain themselves. At a systemic level, I believe that paying low amounts ranging from ₹5,000 onwards per month leads to gatekeeping of our profession. The usual defence by recruiting chambers or lawyers for such low pay is that the first few years of a young associate's character or career is a learning stage when a senior mentors them. We must shed this paternalistic approach.".CJI Chandrachud went on to quote a verse from the sacred Tamil text, the Thirukkural that says that “all the wealth that the good men of this world accumulate must be distributed to deserving people around them.”He said that while junior lawyers come to seniors to learn, they also end up teaching the seniors much about the legal profession and relevant contemporary realities.“Every day that I interact with my own law clerks, one of whom is a lawyer from Madurai, I learn so much more from them. Because the day-to-day and the future truly belongs to the young in our society. It is to the young in the legal profession that we turn to understand the contemporary realities of our times,” the CJI said..He also said that one must stop over-romanticising hard work, especially work without sufficient pay.“Hard work and sound ethics are vital to every person's growth, but to brush aside the systemic social and economic barriers is an unnecessary oversimplification of how success is achieved...This over-romanticisation of hard work, specially work without sufficient pay, is not merely rhetorical but leads to people being expected to work long hours with less sleep and lesser monetary value. As the famous saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. Similarly, it takes the entire Bar to raise competent lawyers, unfettered by their social and economic backgrounds,” the Chief Justice said..During his speech, CJI Chandrachud also advised young lawyers to stay on the path of integrity, truth and justice.He also praised the Bar of the Madurai bench for having successfully evolved from a Bar of the district courts to one that is concerned with diverse matters pertaining to the judiciary and the appellate courts..This is not the first time the CJI has called upon lawyers across the country to pay their juniors well. In November 2022, he had insisted on the importance of lawyers not treating their juniors as slave workers merely because the senior themselves had to learn the law the hard way during their early days in the profession.In May last year too, at a felicitation event organised by the Bar Council of Maharashtra and Goa, the CJI had emphasised on the importance on adequately compensation young lawyers and looking upon them as people who have valuable contributions. .And earlier this month, following an order of the Madras High Court, the Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry had issued a circular urging all bar associations across the State to implement a minimum stipend for junior lawyers..[Read Circular]