The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notices to the Centre, the Bar Council of India, state bar councils and the UGC on a PIL seeking a national advocate verification mechanism to weed out fake lawyers and to put in place a social media code of conduct for them.Petitioner Bar Association of India sought establishment of a National Digital Registry for the Legal Profession of India (NDRLP), a centralised, technology-driven Aadhaar-like database assigning each advocate a unique identifier linked to verified qualifications, enrolment status and disciplinary records.“The establishment of the NDRLP is not merely a matter of professional governance. It is a direct investment in India’s credibility as the world’s largest rule of law based democracy and as a destination for long-term domestic and foreign investment,” the PIL submitted.“Looks like a novel reform, but all law universities have to be made parties and they should disclose who are the bona fide law graduates from those institutes,” a Bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant said, adding it would have to consider the response of various stakeholders before such an exercise was undertaken.“We may have to constitute a new committee with a new composition. We can show you a sample of what kind of nasty statements are being made, and I am sure they have nothing to do with law,” the CJI told the BAI counsel Prashant Kumar.Last month, Bar Council of India Chairperson Manan Kumar Mishra had said that about 35-40 per cent of advocates in the country had fake degrees. The BCI regulates the legal profession in India.“The governance of the legal profession has encountered a structural failure of systemic proportions: there is no single, publicly verifiable, real-time national record of who is enrolled as an advocate in India,” the petitioner submitted.“The current system of enrolment and maintenance of rolls is fragmented across 23 State Bar Councils, operating without uniform standards, without real-time interoperability, and without any mechanism by which a litigant, a court, or an authority can instantly verify whether a person holding themselves out as an advocate is genuinely enrolled, holds verified qualifications, and is in good standing,” the PIL stated.Kumar submitted that issues of advocate verification and digital conduct were interconnected. While comments by common citizens stood on a different footing, statements made by advocates got sanctified in public mind as they carried professional credibility, he said, adding the BAI was not seeking merely prohibitive measures, but a guidance on how advocates, particularly younger lawyers, could responsibly engage with social media.However, the CJI said advocates are mostly very responsible. “The best way is to strengthen the young members of the Bar. Unless they have secured space in the profession, unless they are really periodically trained, brought into the mainstream, given some space in the overcrowded courts, these problems will arise. So the first thing needed to be done is that we must encourage the young lawyers and we must bring them on the front side… Our entire hope lies in young members—the future generation of the profession… Some young lawyers have formed real constructive associations. That is the silver lining,” the CJI said.