Matters handled by the chamber

How to tell which area applies to your matter

Most matters sort themselves by who is involved and what triggered them, rather than by legal label. A dispute is criminal when the state is a party — an FIR has been registered, or could be — and the outcome is punishment, not compensation; this covers everything from a first FIR through bail to trial and appeal. A dispute is matrimonial when it arises from a marriage — divorce, maintenance, custody, or a 498A complaint from either the complainant's or the accused's side. A civil dispute is defined by a claim to property, money, or performance of an agreement, decided by compensation or a court order rather than punishment — this covers property title and partition, cheque dishonour under Section 138, consumer complaints, and RERA matters against a builder.

Some matters genuinely straddle categories — a marriage breakdown that also involves a criminal complaint, or a property dispute that turns into a cheque-bounce case once a settlement fails. Where that happens, the chamber's own case notes decide which page's guidance actually applies; a first conversation usually sorts this out within minutes rather than requiring the reader to self-diagnose from these descriptions alone.

Whichever area applies, the same basic documents speed up that first conversation: any FIR copy, court order, notice, or agreement already in hand; a rough timeline of what happened and when; and, for a criminal matter, whether the reader is the complainant or the person accused — the two sides of the same FIR need entirely different advice, and mixing them up wastes the first meeting. None of this needs to be organised in advance; it simply helps to have the papers within reach rather than filed away.

The featured pages above cover two situations that don't map cleanly onto a single area of law: NRI matters, which are usually matrimonial or property disputes but complicated by distance, power of attorney, and time zones; and domestic violence with child custody, which sits inside matrimonial law but is urgent enough — and procedurally different enough, running through the PWDVA rather than ordinary civil process — to warrant its own dedicated guide rather than a subsection of the divorce page.