I am advocate and as just started a firm with few of my friends. It is a small firm we are yet to cross the turnover of one lakh. In this budget the finance minister proposed to add legal services in service tax net. No issue about it. However the fine print states that individuals lawyers or individual customers would be exempt from it. No problem if individual customers are exempt as their disputes are mainly not business related but family or personal related. However the exemption of indivual lawyers from the tax net seems not to have any logic. i know many individual lawyers earning crores of rupees per annum and their are firms like us who are yet to break even. Thus if any bank or any partnership firm has to give work to any advocate he will prefer individual advocate than any firm. Thus by this move governemt is encouraging individual practice at the cost of firms. The formation of firms shows better orgainsation. Thus by giving exemption to individual advocates government is taking a step backwards. Further just to save tax firms would start billing the clients in individual partners name than firms name, thus making the whole structure very complicated which is against the government policy of simplification. Further their is no any reasonable differentiation between an individual advocate giving services and few individual advocate coming together and forming firm and giving services. Thus no reason for such a difference treatment. The said tax will really make firms like us uncompetative.