Legal Tech Moment - Exploring the Future of Legal Innovation in India

Discover how legal tech transforms India's legal landscape, from AI-driven solutions to digital case management. Is India poised for a legal tech revolution? Explore more in this blog.

There’s a good chance you haven’t noticed there is a startup within the High Court of Karnataka.

For the last couple of years Adithya has been building his startup—Nyaya Nidhi—solving problems in the legal tech space. His is one among several other startups, like Agami arming themselves with an arduous task—to help mitigate the burden on the legal systems at large through efficient technologies at our disposal.

Of course, when you look at it more closely, the word legal tech itself, is a conundrum. It combines two vastly different universes: legal—a system that has existed for centuries—and tech, a highly disruptive industry capable of changing the way we live.

Yet, the space itself is in dire need of encouragement, given the multitude of problems we face as a country. At the highest level—The Supreme Court—is growing weaker at its core given the sheer magnitude of cases that impede its progress. As of May this year, there were at least 80,000 cases in the backlog of this court.

At the lower court levels, the situation is far worse. You only need to take a peek into the National Justice Data Grid to know how truly bad the crisis is.

While the problem statement is clear and startups are pushing themselves to solve these issues, what is stopping them from seeing greater success?

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Barriers to innovation

India’s legal system has remained archaic in many ways. Documentation is still physical, some litigators are naturally resistant to change, and it's hard to implement digitalisation at any level.

(Side note: We also spoke about Online Dispute Resolution with Agami at a recent event. You can catch similar events by subscribing to our calendar here.)

According to one professor from OP Jindal University: “There is hesitation among legal professionals towards the adoption of such tools and techniques, which might stray away from their archaic methods. The reasons behind such an aversion are twofold –challenges faced at the manufacturing level and uneasiness of the end-users to adopt such technologies.”

While one could ease litigators into using more technology, there is another looming issue—language. India has two official languages, Hindi and English, and about 22 Scheduled Languages. Therefore building a model that is on-par with the rest of the country's judicial processes and is consistent with multiple languages with the same level of accuracy, can be difficult to automate and execute.

Perhaps the greatest barrier to scale is the inability to market services. In India, litigators for instance, cannot promote themselves. Here’s that rule:

Rule 36 of the BCI Rules prohibits litigators from soliciting work or advertising, whether directly or indirectly, through circulars, advertisements, touts, personal communications, or interviews not warranted by personal relations.

Law firms on the other hand are permitted to advertise their products through very strict guidelines and can maintain websites which showcase their services, however litigators themselves cannot advertise their products. “I think most legal tech companies have the same challenges to scale as other companies, the restrictions are hardly an issue,” Keerthana Medarametla, Senior Curator, Agami.

So where does that place the space in its entirety? There are four large buckets that startups solving for issues in the space fall into—Legal Service Delivery, Process Efficiency, Access to Legal Recourse and Do-it-Yourself (DIY) tools.

The rise of online dispute resolution or ODR, has also given rise to a few startups in the space.

(ODR is a mechanism to resolve disputes collaboratively outside of court. It integrates technology with trusted mechanisms of dispute resolution: negotiation, mediation, conciliation, and arbitration.)

Like Agami—who was the first to set up a mechanism to access ODR in 2018. It now has over 20 startups that help with this problem. NITI Aayog has constituted a committee to create an effective implementation framework along with a comprehensive action plan for ODR in India.

According to a report by IIMA Ventures, succession management going forward could be a bright spot for startups in the space. With an uptick in digitisation of documents like land records, a combination of this with the right tech infrastructure could be a great source of growth within the legal tech space.

If you’re building in the legal tech space, we would love to hear your thoughts on what some of the greenshoots are in the sector!

See you in the next WeWork Labs blog.