Orissa High Court Notifies Scheme For ‘Lawyer Of The Year Award’ For Young Lawyers From District Courts

The scheme contains details related to features of the award, eligibility to apply, Jury, selection criteria etc. The High Court has planned to confer the award on April 28th every year, which is observed as the ‘Lawyer’s Day’ across the State of Odisha to commemorate the birth anniversary of Utkal Gouraba Madhusudan Das.

"The award shall be an annual Award and shall be in the form of collection of books worth Rs 10,000/- along with a certificate and a memento."

An age-cap has been fixed to assess the performance of lawyers. Only the lawyers between the age of 30 to 40 are eligible to apply for the award. However, the scheme says that the minimum age can be relaxed to 28 years in exceptional cases and only one lawyer from a district will be conferred with the honour every year.

The Jury members will be headed by the District Judges of the respective districts and will have the Chief Judicial Magistrates as its member. Apart from these two judicial officers, three senior lawyers having experience of more than 20 years of practice will be members. The scheme also requires to include a female senior lawyer wherever they are available. The recommendation of the Jury is required to be ‘unanimous’.

To prevent any conflict of interest while selecting the best candidate, the scheme also provides that if an applicant lawyer is related in the first degree to a member of the Jury or has been his/her associate lawyer at any point of time, such Jury member shall not participate in selection process for that applicant Lawyer.

The scheme enumerates the following criteria which shall be taken into consideration by the Jury while recommending the names of the best lawyers.

• The number of cases handled by the Lawyer independently during the year;
• Number of such cases e-filed by the Lawyer during the year.
• The number of judgments/final orders in contested cases, during the year, handled independently by the Lawyer;
• The Lawyer should have conducted at least one trial in a civil or in a criminal case entirely by himself/herself, during the year by appearing for any party i.e., Plaintiff, Defendant, Accused or for the Prosecution or even for the Complainant/ Victim.
• A trial shall be considered complete only when the final judgment/order is pronounced.
• he information in clauses (i) to (v) above shall be provided by the lawyer in Annexure-A to Form-I, annexed to the Scheme and shall be accompanied by self-attested documents which shall be verified by the Office of the District Judge. If any information provided in any of the Forms annexed to this Scheme is found to be false or incorrect, at any point of time, it shall disqualify the Lawyer for the Award.
• The conduct, Court etiquette, general reputation and integrity of the Lawyer.

The scheme also clarifies that “the award is not to be given for the sake of being given. It must be given only to a Lawyer who truly satisfies all the above requirements.”

It is pertinent to mention, last year the High Court had conferred the award on 22 young lawyers from across the district bars of Odisha. While addressing in the event, Chief Justice Muralidhar had said:

“A very important element of the scheme that we want lawyers of integrity. Because unless we get lawyers of integrity, we cannot expect Judges of integrity. Because these lawyers, some of whom will hopefully become Judges, Judges in District Courts and later may be Judges in the High Court. We want to encourage that kind of a lawyer who will stand by principles, who will have ethical practices and will stand as a model for other young lawyers to follow.”