A five-judge Bench of the Apex Court by a 4:1 majority held that a Judge of the High Court or the Supreme Court is ‘public servant’ within the meaning of Section 2 of the Prevention of Corruption Act. Earlier, Chief Justice K.G Balakrishnan had said that the Chief Justice of India was not a public servant and was a constitutional authority which was not even covered by the Right to Information Act, 2005.

Even though the LPO industry is booming in India, law firms are not finding the LPO business very exciting. This is in spite of the fact that is growing LPO industry is a $250 billion global industry, which is growing annually. The reasons for this are that law firms were contracting work for global clients at billing rates between $ 20-100 per hour. However, similar works, which the client wanted to be done in India, like litigation, legal research, and drafting. etc. the firms were charging $200-$300 per hour. Moreover lawyers in India want to be seen as consultants rather than running a back office desk for overseas clients. ALMT, a Mumbai based law firm started a LPO under the name ALMT Synergies and ran it for 3 years before closing it down recently. Even DSK Legal had earlier promoted its LPO business but has now spun it off.

The Indian Government has said that no mergers and acquisitions of telecom licenses would take place if the number of service providers reduced to below four in a circle consequent upon the M&A. The DoT or the Department of Telecom said that its prior approval was necessary for M&A of the licenses and the combined market share of the merged entity shall not be greater than 40% in terms of subscriber base or in terms of revenue. Following the merger, the entities shall be entitled to the total amount of spectrum held by the merging entities, subject to the condition both the licensees will meet within three months from the date of approval of the merger by the DoT and all dues relating to the license of the merging entities in that given service area, will have to be cleared by either of the two licenses before the issue of permission for merger of licenses.

Thousands of Indian immigrants Tuesday won the right to live and work in Britain after a British court ruled that retrospective changes made to their visas were illegal. The landmark ruling by Justice Sir George Newman followed a legal challenge mounted by the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP) Forum, a pressure group consisting mostly of Indian migrants. A majority of the 49, 000 HSMP visa holders most of them Indian and their families faced the prospect of having to leave Britain and find jobs in other countries after the British government made abrupt and retrospective changes to the original visa regime. Existing HSMP holders would have had to re-qualify under a new points based system, which makes, it mandatory for applicants to have earned at least 40,000 pounds in the previous year and awards more points to younger applicants, conditions that the HSMP Forum described as “unfair”.

The Supreme Court has upheld the 27 per cent OBC quota in higher educational institutions like IITs, IIMs and other central universities. While passing the judgement, the apex court clarified that it does not violate the basic structure of the Constitution. After this order, quotas may be implemented as soon as the new session begins. In fact, in the recent admission process, IIMs have already collected data on which applicants are categorised as OBCs. But, at the same time, the court has excluded the creamy layer from getting the benefits of reservation. This layer includes families earning more than 2-and-a-half lakh a year. In fact, one judge specifically called for children of MPs and MLAs - both past and present - to be excluded from the ambit of reservation. But he added that this is just a recommendation and it's totally upto the government whether it accepts this or not. The court has also said that quotas will be reviewed every five years. Now, after this decision, the total reservation in higher education institutes will go up to 49.5%. However, the court has not decided on implementing quota law in private educational institution.

The Supreme Court justified judicial intervention to protect the rights of the people in case of inertia of the executive. The Apex Court, however, sought guidelines for entertaining the PILs to shortcircuit the possible abuse of judicial process though the camouflaged petitions. It said that the judiciary should confine itself to its proper sphere, realising that in a democracy many matters and controversies were best resolved in non-judicial settings.

A district court at The Hague, Netherlands, upheld the judgement of an arbitration panel which ruled that Tata Communications must give the Anil Ambani owned Flag Telecom access to its landing station in Mumbai. Flag Telecom sought damages of $400 million from Tata Communications and VSNL had challenged the tribunal’s decision in the court. The district court has not passed any rulings on the damages claimed by Flag and it is now upto the International Chamber of Commerce or the ICC arbitration panel to take a final view on the issue. The main issue in this case was that Flag wanted access to Mumbai landing station of Flag Europe Asia cable (FEA) so that it could enhance its cable’s capacity. The Flag cable, which stretched from England to Japan and passed through 15 countries, touched India at ‘Mumbai landing station’ which was controlled by Tata Communications. Flag wanted to enhance the capacity of this cable system from 10 Gbps to 80 Gbps, for which it had sought access to Mumbai landing station from the Tatas.