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| Ram Jethmalani fee secrets are revealed - Wiki image |
Staff correspondent, September 8, 2015, NewsCrunch
India's highest paid lawyer Ram Jethmalani's fees secrets have been authoritatively outed.
The 93-year-old lawyer charges Rs 25 lakh per appearance both at the Supreme and the High Courts.
Legally India surveyed top lawyers in Delhi to find out how much seniors such as Ram Jethmalani charged to take up a case. Many senior lawyers, whose fees was outed, confirmed the findings.
It costs Rs 25 lakh to just to get Ram Jethmalani to read your case file and then he charges the same amount for each appearance.
In the most recent case he handled and won, Ram Jethmalani got Ansals off the hook in the Uphaar fire case. As the victims' parents lamented, he hogged the Supreme Court time, argued endlessly, found all means to drag the case for years until his clients came out without any additional prison time.
You may try to guess how much Ansals may have paid for his legal services though there is no exact count of his appearances in the case in the public domain.
Born on 14 September, 1923, in Pakistan, Ram Jethmalani built a successful practice in Karachi before fleeing to India during partition to start all over again. The Nanavati case of 1959, where he represented the prosecution, was his first big break.
He made his fortune in the 1960s by defending a string of smugglers, while also building his reputation as a 'smuggler’s lawyer'. There was no turning back after that, he joined politics, and rose to serve as Union Law Minister.
Off and on a BJP leader, Ram Jethmalani has remained a constant maverick and dissident.
Jethmalani says that the majority of the cases he takes up these days are pro bono - that is he fights them without charging a fee. He has also become very selective in accepting briefs and appears in only a few cases per week.
Other names in Legally India's big buck-lawyers list: Fali Nariman, KK Venugopal, Gopal Subramanium, P Chidambaram, Harish Salve, AM Singhvi, CA Sundaram, Salman Khurshid, KTS Tulsi, Kapil Sibal, Shanti Bhushan, Parag Tripathi and Dushyant Dave.