Advocate Gita Acharya — lawyer in Pokhara, Nepal

Advocate Gita Acharya has practised in Pokhara for over twenty years — long enough that the matters arriving today often involve the second generation of a family whose land or marriage case she handled the first time. Staying in one district has a specific professional value: familiarity with how Kaski District Court runs its calendar, how the Land Revenue and Survey offices in Kaski treat older records, and which disputes in this valley settle and which do not.

The practice is general by design. In Pokhara, problems do not arrive in tidy categories. A partition dispute becomes a criminal complaint; a divorce turns on which plot was ancestral; a hotel lease dispute is really an inheritance dispute between the landlord's heirs. A single advocate holding the whole picture serves the client better than three specialists each seeing one quarter of it.

A significant part of the work is for Nepalis abroad. Kaski sends people to the Gulf, Malaysia, Korea, Japan, Australia, Europe and North America, and their property, families and disputes stay here. Running those matters properly under an authorised power of attorney — and telling a client honestly what can and cannot be done without them present — has become a distinct part of the practice.