Website sells lawyer neckbands with fake reviews from CJIs, Supreme Court judges, Senior Advocates

An e-commerce website named Lawkart, selling "Premium Cotton" Lawyer Neckbands at ₹499, recently caught the attention of the legal community after a lawyer pointed out that it featured rave but fake reviews from several legal doyens, including senior lawyers, Supreme Court judges and even Chief Justices of India.

In a widely shared LinkedIn post, Pune-based lawyer Ankur Jahagirdar noted that the price of the neckband itself appeared highly inflated.

"But that’s not the fun part," his post added.

"The fun part is the reviews on the neck band that are published on the website. The reviewers? Justice SA Bobde, Justice DY Chandrachud, Justice Arun Mishra, Justice BR Gavai, Justice Rohinton Nariman etc. It’s basically more or less the same script in all these fake reviews," he pointed out.

As on October 30, the website featured "reviews" that named as its authors former Chief Justices of India (CJIs) SA Bobde, DY Chandrachud, UU Lalit, NV Ramana, present CJI BR Gavai, former Supreme Court judges Justices Deepak Gupta, Hrishikesh Roy, RF Nariman, Arun Mishra, Madan Lokur, Kurian Joseph and sitting Supreme Court judges Justices Surya Kant and Vikram Nath, among others.

Another "judge" even endorsed his "brother judge's" review, albeit anonymously.

Meanwhile, the senior lawyers featured as "reviewers" included former Attorney General of India KK Venugopal, Solicitor General of India Tushar Mehta and Senior Advocates Harish Salve, Mukul Rohatgi, Rakesh Dwivedi, Indira Jaising, Menaka Guruswamy, Colin Gonsalves, Anand Grover, Abhishek Singhvi, Kapil Sibal, P Chidambaram, Dushyant Dave and more.

As first reported by India Today, the website even went so far as to feature 3-4 month old reviews from senior lawyers, Fali Nariman, Soli Sorabjee and Ram Jethmalani who have passed away.

Those unconnected with the legal profession were not spared either, as the website seemingly featured reviews from political personalities such as a "Yuva Sena Chief", Raut Sanjay and Aaditya Thackeray, Sharad Pawar, Ajit Pawar, Sachin Pilot, Omar Abdullah, Mehbooba Mufti, Farooq Abdulla, Shashi Tharoor, Ghulam Nabi Azad among others.

However, after these reviews did a little too well and drew scrutiny from legal circles, they seem to have been deleted now and can no longer be found on the webpage that features the neckband product offered for sale by LawKart.com (at a "discounted" price of ₹499, instead of ₹1,799!).

The advertised neckband on October 30 had 268 reviews. The only neckband product that is now advertised on the website as on today (November 4) has 147 reviews.

Speaking to Bar & Bench, Advocate Jahagirdar, who first called out the reviews, said,

"The exponentially high price of the band and fake reviews posted in the name of Supreme Court judges and deceased eminent personalities like senior advocate Ram Jethmalani made it look like a scam, a bad practice, or a dark pattern being followed by the concerned website. I wanted to highlight this. That’s why I put it up on my LinkedIn page."