AI in law and orderThe Indian legal system is realizing its flaws and slowly housing AI in law and order to address challenges.

Technology has taken center stage in the 21st century. Starting from mobile robots at manufacturing houses to voice assistants in customer help centers, the adoption of artificial intelligence has grown drastically in recent years. While AI is changing the face of every sector, law and order have been the least disrupted so far. The fear of giving legal decision-making to technology has put humankind at the edge. However, AI in law and order is becoming a reality today. The Indian legal system is realizing its flaws and slowly housing artificial intelligence to address those challenges.

The Indian legal sector has been way too reliant on traditional methods to carry out law and order routines for a long time. However, over the past couple of years, we have come to a realization that technology could do better than manual workers can. The Indian legal system started its adoption of AI in law and order from legal research initially and then moved on to e-records. Since the Indian legal system is void and consists of thousands of people, maintaining digital records of all the cases and developments has become necessary over time. Today, legal workers are getting all the information they need in seconds, thanks to artificial intelligence. Some private legal firms are even using applications of AI to analyze records. A plethora of Indian tech startups including NearLaw, Practice League, SpotDraft, etc are developing effective solutions to leverage next-generation legal research. But to exactly use AI in law and order in India, we have to first know the challenges the legal sector is facing in the digital world.

Why AI is the Big Challenge in the Indian Legal Sector?

To begin with, the legal sector is a hard nut for AI to crack. Everything starting from legal vocabulary to documentation, judgment, criminal documents, legal reports, etc are very important places where no errors should occur. On the other hand, we also have bias challenges to take care of.

Legal documents play a big role in determining criminal acts. It is a vast area where abbreviations, sections, and sub-sections are divided into paragraphs and subparagraphs. Interpreting these legal records effectively is a pain since some words’ literal meaning could be different from their legal meaning. Therefore, linguistic problems are something that requires quick addressing. Besides, AI tools might not be able to interpret the colonial words that are used for centuries now. Training the AI models specifically to address these challenges could be a problem.

Language barrier and connectivity issues are also a matter of concern in Indian courts. While the Supreme Court and the High Courts use the English language as their official language, district courts and tribunals function in regional languages according to The Quint. Therefore, gathering the records under a central AI would be extremely difficult. On the other hand, bias has embroiled to be a part of the judiciary system. The Quint has stated that when the 50th Judge of the Supreme Court will be appointed, 32% of Chief Justice would have been male Brahmins. The publication further claims that there have been only 11 Supreme Court women judges in 71 years.

The Covid-19 Impact and How it Fast-Tracked AI Adoption

Although Covid-19 was hated for many reasons, one thing that it changed for good was making people realize the necessity of technology. Similarly, the Indian judicial body has experienced the flavour of technology, thanks to the lockdowns. The courts began using e-filing facilities starting them. In May 2020, the Supreme Court unleashed a new system of e-filing and AI-based referencing. Even when the initiative was taken as an after effect of the pandemic, it addressed many underlying challenges that was ravaging the judicial sphere so far. The recent development of e-courts project also seeks to address the judiciary’s digital deprivation.

AI in Indian Judiciary in 2022

The Indian judiciary has introduced way more technology than anybody’s expectations in the past couple of years. The digitizing of court records have transformed the documents and case information to a database, which is paving the way for a National Data Centre. It will aid in storage of all information about penalty activity, filings, stages, and resolutions, and case subject matters. Besides, the court hearing are also going on online mode after the pandemic via video conferencing service.