Code of law: How AI is helping India’s lawyers work faster

Sumain Malik has always been a raconteur, the kind whose stories lead to deals. Long before India's legal world learned to speak digital, he was lugging desktops across cities to sign up early adopters for SCC (Supreme Court Cases) Online, a leading subscription-driven legal research platform. Those were the days of sharing court judgements on recordable CD-ROMs and floppy disks. Some firms didn't own computers at all, so Malik, briefly, sold those too.

Three decades later, Malik's faith in technology looks less like evangelism and more like foresight.

Today, as the CEO and Director of SCC Online, he is overseeing the pilot of an AI-powered, conversational legal research assistant built on Microsoft's Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Search. Lawyers (and any user) can now ask questions in plain language instead of Boolean strings and arcane connectors (legal database syntax) making searches easy.

"Besides speed and accuracy, it's about using AI to make the law accessible to more people, easier to find and understand," says Malik.

The significance of that shift becomes clearer when viewed against the pressures on India's justice system.

As of December 2025, India's district courts, which hear cases at the first level, hold over 40 million pending cases. High Courts add 6.2 million more and the Supreme Court's backlog exceeds 90,000. The estimates drawn from the National Judicial Data Grid highlights how pendency rises through procedural errors, adjournments and documentation gaps. In a 2018 policy paper, 'Strategy for New India @75', Niti Aayog estimated that it would take 324 years to clear India's judicial backlog.

For lawyers, these numbers translate into an unforgiving daily reality. Between mounting caseloads and heavy documentation, hours are lost searching for precedents that could change the course of a case.

Senior Supreme Court advocate Kotla Harshavardhan sees these pressures daily where delays stem from the mechanics of a system stretched thin. It's simply not just a shortage of judges or lawyers, but a shortage of tools that can reduce error, compress timelines and give legal professionals time back.

Amid these constraints, AI is beginning to fill the gap between volume and capacity.

From backlog to bandwidth

With SCC's new intelligent, conversational research assistant - built using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Search, Cosmos DB, and Document Intelligence - even a first-year associate can ask complex questions in plain language and receive expert-grade insights. "By moving beyond keyword search and toward contextualized reasoning, SCC's AI aims to help lawyers to move from research to solutions, in order to prepare cases better and faster, reduce unnecessary appeals and gradually ease pendency," says Malik.

That shift is also evident in corporate law firms.

At Trilegal, a leading full-service law firm in India, AI is reshaping legal work through steady structural changes. Partner and Management Committee member Nishant Parikh, says, "As early adopters, we are curating AI solutions that enhance our ability to handle complexity at speed, allowing lawyers to focus on judgment, negotiation and strategy."

The firm's approach rests on embedding AI into everyday workflows. "From knowledge management to predictive analytics and client-collaboration tools, AI will ultimately support a steady shift toward legal systems that are more accessible and intuitive," he adds.

Using Microsoft 365 Copilot, Trilegal's lawyers can draft, summarize, and search content securely within familiar tools. On Azure OpenAI, the firm has built bespoke applications grounded in its own knowledge repositories, while Power BI provides near real-time insights across matters and teams. Its document management system (DMS) has evolved into a full stack legal lifecycle platform-streamlining creation, compliance, versioning, retrieval, and enabling knowledge sharing across more than a thousand lawyers.

From public courts grappling with scale to private firms managing complexity, AI is beginning to alter how legal work gets done. Together, SCC Online and Trilegal, represent two ends of India's legal spectrum. One is a legacy legal research powerhouse and other an innovative legal practice, both are turning to AI not as a replacement for legal judgment but as an ally to make legal work faster and more accessible.

For Dr Avnish Kshatriya, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Trilegal, this change is as much cultural as technological. "In practice, as lawyers embraced technology tools into their daily workflows, adoption accelerated and helped catalyze a wider cultural shift across the firm. This momentum was largely driven by the virtuous cycle of benefits accrued by users adopting them, rather than by top-down mandates," he says.

Trilegal has also partnered with legal tech startup Lucio to tailor AI tools for legal research, drafting, and largescale document review. Hosted on the firm's Azure environment, the system ensures client confidentiality while allowing AI to work across high volume, complex legal material.

Senior Associate Kuruvila Jacob points out the difference. Five years ago, he spent his evenings extracting dates from thousand-page files. Today, those tasks take minutes. The turning point came in 2024, when confidential documents could finally be uploaded securely into AI systems. The change has allowed him to put more time to upskill himself, mentoring juniors, participate in wider firm initiatives such as the firm's Digital Innovation Group and take up more pro bono cases. The goal, he insists, is to weave AI into workflows so seamlessly that it becomes "the invisible colleague" that is present everywhere, yet is never the decision-maker.

As for SCC Online, the platform surfaces insights across more than 4 million judgments spanning 400+ databases, enabling lawyers to move from hours of manual review to minutes of comprehension. The platform (with 150,000 users) is expected to benefit 75,000+ legal professionals across India, significantly reducing search time and improving research quality at scale.

Undoubtedly, trust remains central to this innovation. SCC Online's data stays inside a closed environment; sensitive content never leaves their sandbox. Every AI-generated statement carries a citation. "Accuracy is non-negotiable," Malik says. A point reiterated by Harshavardhan who regularly uses SCC Online.

An inclusive system

What begins in law firms rarely stays there.

Partner Nikhil Narendran of Trilegal's Technology, Media, and Telecommunications Practice points out that India's real barrier is not the absence of laws, but access-across languages, literacy levels, and geographies.

"AI can make legislation and judgments searchable in regional languages, offer initial guidance to those who cannot afford legal help, and assist judges and investigators in disposing of matters more efficiently. It can serve as a force multiplier by aiding both lawyers and judges in moving faster with research, comprehension, recording of testaments and drafting, and save millions of hours of valuable time, thereby making justice delivery faster," he says.

Courtroom transcription offers a clear example of practical impact. While over 90 percent of Supreme Court and High Court judgments are authored in English, only a little above 10 percent of the country's population is English speaking, as per Census 2011 figures. As is evident, for most citizens, their own case files remain inaccessible.

"So over 4,000 courts across several states now use AI-enabled systems such as Adalat AI to record proceedings in real time," says Vidhi Udayshankar, Associate at Ikigai Law, a Delhi-based legal and public policy firm. The system has materially improved the speed and accuracy of trial records, reducing adjournments caused by disputes over depositions and shortening timelines for certified copies. "This is an often overlooked but critical pain point for litigants," she adds.

Across India, that future is already visible.

Be it the real-time transcription of Supreme Court hearings or the machine-translated judgments in 18 languages, the apex court's own initiatives signal a system evolving from AI as back-office support to AI as operational backbone.

"We have seen this before. Tools that begin in law firms gradually become part of the broader justice system. Internet research, computers and mobile devices in practice, tablets in courtrooms, video conferencing for hearings, and online case databases all originated in law firms and gradually became part of the broader justice ecosystem. Each of these shifts helped improve access to justice and made legal processes more efficient for the public. The same playbook is now taking shape with AI," says Nikhil.

For citizens, these are not abstractions.

In consumer disputes, service matters and family law cases, particularly in urban courts, reduced friction can materially improve day-to-day engagement with the justice system. Judicial delay carries heavy economic and personal costs; even incremental gains matter.

"In law, AI should support and not replace human judgment," Udayshankar says. "Trust comes from keeping accountability with people, while allowing technology to reduce friction where the risks are lower."

The jury is still out on AI's long-term impact on India's justice system. But, in a system defined by scale and constraint, the incremental gains now underway, point to a pragmatic shift where lawyers are spending less time searching, courts moving a little faster, and access improving.

Top image: At Trilegal, AI-powered tools are becoming part of everyday legal work, helping teams research faster, sift through complex information, and focus on judgment over routine. Photo by Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Microsoft