When Rankings Are Revenue: Lawyer Directories and Competition Law

[Pranshu is a student at National Law School of India University.]

For over a decade, platforms like JustDial, Sulekha, and AdvocateKhoj have listed advocates alongside plumbers and housekeeping services, assigning them ratings and designations like “platinum” or “top service provider.” The Madras High Court’s 2024 judgment in PN Vignesh v. Chairman and Members of the Bar Council (Vignesh) treated this as a problem of professional ethics: these platforms facilitated solicitation and thus violated Rule 36 of the Bar Council of India Rules 1975 (BCI Rules). The court directed the Bar Council of India (BCI) to issue disciplinary circulars and ordered offending platforms to remove non-compliant content. The BCI followed with a press release on 8 July 2024 and the Ministry of Law issued a further statement on 9 August 2024 reaffirming the prohibition.

Such framing correctly captures the ethical dimension but leaves a structurally different and critical issue unaddressed. When lawyer-directory platforms sell “premium” or “top-rated” designations to advocates without disclosing this to searching litigants, the conduct raises a competition law concern that Rule 36 enforcement does not reach — one that would persist even in a reformed legal advertising regime. This post notes what the Vignesh ruling holds within the framework of Rule 36, conceptualises lawyer directories as two-sided markets, and discusses the regulatory interventions that could address the competition concerns raised by paid-ranking practices.

Rule 36 and Vignesh

Rule 36 of the BCI Rules, enacted under Section 49(1)(c) of the Advocates Act 1961, prohibits advocates from soliciting work or advertising “either directly or indirectly.” The Supreme Court in Bar Council of Maharashtra v. MV Dabholkarexplained the rationale for such a sweeping prohibition, holding that the legal profession partakes of a public character incompatible with commercial self-promotion. The 2008 amendment, prompted by VB Joshi v. Union of India, created a limited exception: advocates may publish basic information on their own personal websites under BCI approval, such as their name, enrolment number, qualifications, and areas of practice. This proviso is strictly advocate-facing; its permission extends only as far as an advocate’s own personal website, leaving third-party directory platforms entirely outside its scope.

Vignesh confirms this. The court found that platforms listing advocates by paid tier, facilitating client-advocate matching, and offering fixed-price legal services were engaging in “touting” within Rule 36’s meaning. The court also held that where a platform’s own activity (assigning ratings, creating commercial tiers, facilitating matched referrals, etc.) constitutes the unlawful conduct, the platform cannot claim passive-intermediary protection under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act 2000.^[1] The BCI’s subsequent circulars address only this ethical aspect and do not take note of the structural economic conduct of the platforms as market actors.

The Competition Architecture of Lawyer Directories

Platforms like AdvocateKhoj, LawRato, and the lawyer-services verticals of JustDial and Sulekha are two-sided marketswhere advocates seek clients on one side, and litigants seek legal representation on the other. The platform earns revenue through listing fees, lead-generation charges, or “premium” tier subscriptions paid by advocates.

Such a market structure leads to network effects, where more advocates attract more litigants, and vice versa. Over time, this leads to structural concentration and high barriers to entry. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) and the Standing Committee on Finance have confirmed that self-reinforcing network effects in data-driven platform markets generate exactly this dynamic (see here and here).

For the purposes of market definition, the CCI’s treatment of online intermediation markets (“for booking of hotels in India”) in Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India and Another v. MakeMyTrip India Private Limited and Others (MMT/OYO) offers a ready reference point: a two-sided intermediation market is defined by the specific matching function the platform provides. Likewise, it is appropriate to speak of the relevant market for our analysis as the “online intermediation services for legal representation in India.” A litigant searching for a lawyer on JustDial, for example, does not readily substitute for a general Google search or a Bar Council referral list. This is because these platforms offer a curated, structured matching function that mitigates the information asymmetry between litigants and legal professionals in a manner not replicable by a general search or a referral list. The CCI’s findings in Umar Javeed v. Google LLC, upholding “online general web search” as a distinct market from specialised digital services, confirm that platform-specific intermediation functions constitute separate markets under the Competition Act 2002.

Paid Rankings: A Section 4 Analysis

At the outset, the author intends to make two preliminary points. First, Section 62 of the Competition Act 2002 provides that the Act operates “in addition to, and not in derogation of” other legislation. This means that competition law’s application is not displaced by the Advocates Act’s professional regulation. US courts established the equivalent principle in Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar, holding that the legal profession is not exempt from antitrust scrutiny on the basis of its professional character. Second, dominance in this specific market has not been formally established, so the argument here is that the alleged conduct prima facie raises a competition law issue and is thus worthy of investigation by the CCI.

The factual premise

The business model of these platforms is built on paid visibility rather than merit-based ranking, and they say so openly. JustDial’s Annual Report 2023-24 discloses that its “search results are aimed at optimising user experience by serving the most relevant results along with multiple tools for filtering alongside giving higher visibility to paying customers.” (emphasis supplied) In FY 2023-24, JustDial reported 583,690 active paid campaigns as its core monetisation instrument. If a litigant searches for “criminal lawyer, Delhi” on JustDial, the results will be ordered as per the subscription tier, rather than experience, success rate, or peer reputation.

The section 4(2)(a)(i) case

Section 4(2)(a)(i) of the Competition Act 2002 targets unfair or discriminatory conditions in the provision of services. There is a textbook case of discrimination here because advocates who subscribe to such services get better website placement, while those who do not pay for visibility effectively become invisible. The most applicable Indian precedent is the CCI’s finding in MMT/OYO: the CCI found that MakeMyTrip’s practice of reducing the “visibility” of non-compliant hotels (internally called “deboosting”) deployed ranking power to enforce commercial compliance rather than reflect genuine quality, constituting discriminatory treatment under Section 4.

As Massimo Motta suggests, the benchmark for abuse of dominance by platforms should be what a neutral intermediary would do. The competition concern would then arise precisely at the point where rankings should have been based on merit but were distorted due to payments made by market participants to the platform. The EU Commission’s decision in Google Search (Shopping), upheld by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Google LLC and Alphabet Inc. v. European Commission (September 2024), confirms that a digital intermediary abusing its dominance by manipulating platform rankings, to favor the commercial interests of particular parties, may be held to be an abusive conduct.

Litigant deception and the concurrent regulatory picture

Litigants on the other side make competition harm more complex because, even though they believe they are making an informed choice, they actually respond to a commercially engineered signal. The Central Consumer Protection Authority’s (CCPA) Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns 2023 expressly identify “disguised advertisement” as a prohibited dark pattern, and this consumer-protection violation does not displace CCI jurisdiction. The position is analogous to WhatsApp LLC v. Competition Commission of India, where the CCI asserted jurisdiction over data-sharing conduct notwithstanding the concurrent applicability of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, and the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal upheld that jurisdiction. The CJEU reached an analogous position on the concurrence of data-protection and competition law regimes in Meta Platforms v. Bundeskartellamt. Here, the same ranking opacity affects both consumers and competition. The author suggests that both regimes can act independently and simultaneously.

Addressing the counterargument

The obvious procompetitive justification for paid placement is that payment acts as a quality signal: an advocate who subscribes is presumably committed and professionally active, so higher placement benefits litigants. There are two reasons why this argument fails.

First, as Spence argues, a market signal is effective only if it is received and correctly interpreted as such by the receiver. Where the commercial basis is never disclosed, litigants cannot weigh it. Thus, this so-called “signal” is not a signal of quality but, in reality, hidden manipulation. Second, even with disclosure, the platform has no institutional incentive to curate for quality when revenue flows from advocates regardless of competence. Thus, the incentives would systematically be skewed toward revenue maximization and away from any sort of quality sorting.

This competition concern survives any reform of the ethics framework. Ethics asks whether advocates may solicit, but competition asks whether, if they do so through digital intermediaries, the latter must do so transparently and non-discriminatorily.

The Path Forward

This is a case where two failures reinforce each other.

First, the BCI’s enforcement posture since Vignesh has been to extend the prohibition wholesale, treating all platform-facilitated advocate information (whether paid preferential placement or basic merit-based directory information) as equally objectionable. A more nuanced de lege ferenda approach would be to distinguish between the two categories. If the BCI were ever to carve out a compliant third-party directory model (which would require a fresh rule amendment, since the 2008 proviso creates no platform permissions), platforms operating under such a dispensation should be required to label paid placements clearly as “sponsored.” This converts the disclosure obligation already present in the CCPA’s dark patterns framework into an enforceable platform condition.

Second, the CCI has failed as well. No information appears to have been filed alleging abuse of dominance in the market for online legal intermediation services. The appropriate vehicle (pending formal proceedings) is a CCI market study into online legal intermediation services which would examine ranking practices, revenue models, and the terms on which advocates are listed. The CCI has shown willingness to act suo motu in digital platform markets before (see here and here), and its 2025 AI Market Study identifies opaque algorithmic self-preferencing and discriminatory ranking as areas warranting enforcement attention — findings that apply with equal force to lawyer directories.

As for the Draft Digital Competition Bill (DCB), its quantitative thresholds for designation as a systemically significant digital enterprise (SSDE), including INR 4,000 crore India turnover — likely exclude specialist legal directories. However, the CCI retains discretionary designation power under Section 3(3) of the DCB, which expressly considers network effects, lock-in, and user dependence as qualifying criteria; upon any such designation, the DCB’s non-discrimination and anti-self-preferencing obligations would target precisely this class of conduct.

Conclusion

Vignesh rightly found that online platforms were enabling solicitation in violation of BCI Rules. Its framing, however, left unanswered a question of equal urgency: when platforms rank advocates by payment rather than merit and present paid designations to litigants without disclosure, they raise a prima facie competition concern that Section 4 of the Competition Act 2002 is designed to address. As digital intermediaries become the primary gateway through which ordinary litigants access legal services, the transparency and non-discrimination of their ranking practices demand attention from the CCI,  and from any future BCI rule reform worth its name.

^[1] JustDial has challenged the judgment before the Supreme Court by way of SLP (C) Number 17844 of 2024, contending that its directory-listing service falls within the 2008 proviso and is distinguishable from the touting conducted by Quikr and Sulekha; the matter remains pending.