AI in Indian Judicial SystemIndian Government is actively incorporating AI in the Indian judicial system with defining technologies in AI.

Indian legal system is notorious for cases running for years. While there can be many reasons why courts fail in delivering quick justice, lack of adequate staff is one. According to a NITI Aayog paper submitted in 2018, Indian courts have around 4 crore cases pending which will take more than 324 years. Justice delayed is justice denied. To bridge this gap, the Indian Government is actively incorporating AI in the Indian judicial system with defining technologies like AI, ML, and NLP to ease the burden on the system. Legal procedures involve many run-of-the-mill, high-volume tasks such as legal research, diligence, document drafting, electronic discovery, etc, which are kind of routine and repetitive tasks which do not require any legal skills. If only Artificial Intelligence can be trained to carry out these tasks, the legal fraternity can focus on more complex tasks such as strategic planning and formulating refined arguments. Ever since AI was first introduced in the legal industry in 2017 by Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, it has come a long way. Though only 4% of the legal industry is using AI, it is ticking all the right boxes using advanced AI tools in implementing AI in the Indian judicial system in different segments of case resolution.

How can AI tools aid justice delivery?

Starting from Virtual hearing, which enables the online delivery system, AI tools like SUVAS (Supreme Court Vidhik Anuvaad Software) for legal translation, SPACE (Supreme Court Portal for Assistance in Court Efficiency), a comprehensive tool that lays the framework for utilizing AI in the legal system, AI in Indian judicial system has been a fertile ground for experimentation and application of artificial intelligence in public service. A typical court case involves interpreting a complex web of arguments with supporting data and facts. AI is all about ‘intelligence’, and so there have been inventions such as neural network models developed by IIT-Kharagpur to automatically read and interpret the rhetorical roles of sentences in legal cases. These kinds of advancements certainly raise concerns, because judicial cases are sensitive and require discretionary abilities based on sound knowledge of law of the land, that too on a case-by-case basis. Some cases fall beyond the purview of legal analytics.

Ethics of implementing AI in the judiciary system

In this context, Justice Bobde’s view on AI in the Indian judicial system that it should not replace judges comes as a relief. Data privacy is another area of concern that needs regulation for preventing misuse of privy legal data. At the end of the day, Artificial Intelligence works on what is fed to it and doesn’t have a mind of its own. Therefore, selective application of AI in the Indian judicial system should be on the priority list of judicial administrators and Governments as well.