Advocate terms

You must be an advocate enrolled with a State Bar Council in India, entitled to practise, and not subject to any suspension or disciplinary order that prevents you from advising clients. You must tell us promptly if that changes.

Before your profile can be booked, you submit your enrolment number and certificate for each state in which you are enrolled. We check these against the State Bar Council roll. Your profile becomes bookable only when your account is approved and at least one enrolment is verified.

You may only take consultations for matters concerning a state in which you hold a verified enrolment. The platform enforces this at the point of booking; it is not a matter of judgement.

Submitting an enrolment that is not yours, or that you know to be invalid, ends your access immediately and will be reported to the relevant State Bar Council.

Your professional obligations are unchanged by using this platform. You remain bound by the Advocates Act, 1961, the Bar Council of India Rules, and the standards of professional conduct that apply to you.

You are solely responsible for the advice you give. We do not supervise, review or approve it, and we express no view on it.

You are responsible for checking for conflicts of interest before accepting a consultation, and for declining where one exists.

You publish the hours during which you are willing to take consultations, and you may block time whenever you need to. Clients can only book inside those hours.

Once a consultation is confirmed, we expect you to attend it. If you cannot, cancel or propose a new time as early as you can: repeated late cancellations or non-attendance are grounds for removal.

If you cannot attend a consultation, you must move it more than 12 hours before it is due to start. Inside that window the client can no longer change it either, and they are relying on you to appear. We remind you by email and in the application about a day beforehand, and again shortly before the window closes.

You are not paid for a consultation you cancel, whenever you cancel it, nor for one you do not attend. The client is credited the full fee in either case. This is not a penalty charged to you: it is simply that the consultation you agreed to give did not take place.

A client who cancels within 12 hours of the start, or who does not attend, forfeits their fee, and you are settled for that consultation in the ordinary way: you held the time and could no longer sell it.

Repeated late cancellation or non-attendance is a ground for suspension or removal under the section below.

We agree with you, in writing and in advance, a fixed amount payable to you per consultation. That amount is recorded on the platform and you can see it at any time.

We separately set the fee the client pays. The difference between the two is our margin, and it is how the platform is funded. You are not charged a listing fee, a subscription, or a fee for placement.

We collect the client’s payment, and we settle with you monthly for consultations completed in the preceding period, to the account you provide. Cancelled and refunded consultations are not settled.

You are responsible for your own tax, including declaring this income and any GST that applies to you. We will provide statements of what we have paid you.

A change to your agreed rate applies only to consultations booked after the change. Bookings already taken settle at the rate agreed when they were made.

Three amounts are withheld from what you are paid. None of them is tax on your own advice, and all three are set out on the statement you receive each month.

Your legal services are exempt from GST. Advice given by an advocate to a client who is not a business entity is exempt under Notification 12/2017-Central Tax (Rate), Sl. No. 45. We charge the client no GST on your fee, and you owe none on it.

Our commission is not exempt. The service we supply to you: finding you the client, holding the appointment, taking the money, giving you the tools to advise: is a taxable supply in its own right, and GST at 18% applies to it under section 9(1) of the CGST Act. That GST is charged on our commission only, never on your fee and never on what the client pays. You will see it as a separate line.

You should know that you will not usually be able to reclaim that GST as input credit, because section 17(2) of the CGST Act blocks credit on inputs used to make exempt supplies, and your advice is exempt. Treat it as a cost of the platform rather than as tax you can recover.

Tax collected at source. As an electronic commerce operator we collect tax at source under section 52 of the CGST Act on the value of consultations facilitated, and deposit it in GSTR-8 by the 10th of the following month. If you are registered for GST it is credited to your electronic cash ledger and is yours to use.

Tax deducted at source. Under section 393(1), Table Sl. No. 8(v) of the Income-tax Act, 2025, which carried section 194-O of the 1961 Act forward from 1 April 2026 at the same rate: we deduct income tax on the gross value of consultations facilitated through us, and report it in Form 26Q. This is income tax, not GST, and an exemption from GST does not affect it. It is deducted at the lower rate only where we hold your PAN; without a PAN section 206AA requires us to deduct at a materially higher rate. You may set the deduction against your own income tax liability.

What we need from you. Your PAN, so that tax is deducted at the lower rate, and your GSTIN if you hold one. If you are registered, tell us: it determines whether our invoice to you carries CGST and SGST or IGST, and whether tax collected at source can reach your ledger at all. Keep both current; we use whatever we hold on the day a statement is raised.

Your returns are yours. We account for the tax we charge, collect and deduct. We do not file anything on your behalf, we do not advise you on your position, and nothing here is tax advice. The rates above are those in force when these terms were published and may change; the statement always shows the rate actually applied.

You are being asked to list on a platform run by people who are not advocates. That deserves an explanation rather than an assurance, so here is the basis on which it is done, and where the limits are.

You practise; we do not. Only an advocate on a State Bar Council roll may practise law: sections 29 and 33 of the Advocates Act, 1961. Lexoradv gives no advice, takes no instructions and exercises no judgement about your matters. The client engages you, the advice is yours, and the professional duty for it is yours alone.

What we charge for is the platform, not the advice.Our commission buys introduction, scheduling, payment collection, video, document exchange and records. It is not a share of your professional fee and it is not contingent on the outcome of any matter. This distinction is the whole of it: Rule 2 of Chapter II, Part VI of the Bar Council of India Rules forbids an advocate sharing fees with a person who is not an advocate, so our fee is charged for our own service, invoiced to you separately, and taxed as such.

Why we ask you to agree to a figure we set. The two are not in tension. We determine the commission, as any supplier determines its own price; you decide whether to accept it. That acceptance is not a formality: it is what the arrangement above rests on. A charge you never agreed to would not be a service you bought from us; it would be money taken out of your professional fee, which is the thing Rule 2 prohibits. Your agreement is what makes it the former. It is also why we can invoice you for it and charge GST on it: an invoice presupposes a supply the recipient accepted.

There is a second reason, which is yours rather than ours. The commission decides what a client is publicly asked to pay for a consultation with you. You receive your fee either way, but it is your name against that price, so it is not a number we should be able to move without asking.

Your fee is yours. You state what you wish to receive; we add a commission on top to arrive at what the client pays. The commission is ours and the fee is yours, and no discount or coupon we offer a client ever reduces what you are paid: it comes out of our margin. You are shown the exact figures for every length and area and nothing is published until you accept them.

On advertising. Rule 36 of the same Chapter restricts how an advocate may solicit work. Your listing states facts: enrolment, practice areas, experience, languages, fee, and we do not publish claims of superiority, do not sell placement, and do not rank or recommend one advocate over another. Advocates are listed alphabetically. If you believe anything on your profile crosses that line, tell us and we will remove it.

Privilege. Communications with a client who engages you are protected under section 126 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 (now section 132 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023). We store documents and your written advice so that the client can reach them, with access confined to the two of you, and we do not read them, mine them or disclose them except where the law compels us.

What we are not telling you. This section explains the basis we have proceeded on; it is not legal advice to you, and you are better placed than we are to judge it. The application of the Bar Council Rules to online platforms is not fully settled, and if the position changes we will change these terms and ask you to accept them again rather than rely on the ones you signed today.

Client material reaches you scoped to a single consultation. You may use it only for that consultation, and you must not download, copy or retain it beyond what your professional obligations require.

Your consultation notes are private to you unless you choose to share them with the client. Sharing is a deliberate act on your part; nothing is shared by default.

Do not record a consultation without the client’s consent.

Advocates are listed alphabetically. We do not rank, feature, promote, or sort by rating, and placement cannot be bought. This is deliberate: a platform that ranked advocates would risk operating as advertising on your behalf, which your professional rules restrict.

Clients may leave a review after a completed consultation. Reviews are moderated before publication. We will not publish a review that is abusive or discloses confidential detail, but we will not remove one simply because it is unflattering.

We may suspend or remove your profile if:

• Your enrolment lapses, or you become unable to practise
• Verification cannot be completed or is later found to be false
• You repeatedly miss confirmed consultations
• You breach these terms or your professional obligations

Where we suspend or remove you, we will tell you why. Amounts already owed to you for completed consultations remain payable. You may leave at any time; consultations already booked should be honoured or cancelled with reasonable notice.

These terms are governed by the laws of India.

The courts at Hyderabad, Telangana have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of them. Lexoradv is registered and carries on business at Hyderabad, so those courts have jurisdiction under section 20 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 independently of this clause, which is what makes the clause effective. Parties may agree to confine a dispute to one court that would otherwise have jurisdiction, but cannot confer jurisdiction on a court that would not: Hakam Singh v. Gammon (India) Ltd., (1971) 1 SCC 286, and M/s Swastik Gases Pvt. Ltd. v. Indian Oil Corporation Ltd., (2013) 9 SCC 32.

Nothing here affects any right you have to complain to your State Bar Council or the Bar Council of India, whose disciplinary jurisdiction over you under Chapter V of the Advocates Act, 1961 is not ours to restrict and is not displaced by anything in this agreement.

Before going to court. Write to us first at the address below. Most disagreements are about a figure on a statement or a consultation that went wrong, and both are quicker to settle by looking at the record than by litigating it.

Changes. We may update these terms and will ask you to accept the new version when we do. The version you accepted governs consultations booked under it: a change never applies backwards to a consultation already taken.

Questions: help@lexoradv.com.