• In the Indian context, one of the greatest applications of AI can be adapted to the Indian judiciary.
• China has already implemented Xiao Zhi 3.0 (‘Little Wisdom’), which claims to have helped to cut a judge’s average workload by over a third and saved Chinese citizens 1.7 billion working hours from 2019 to 2021.

Need for use of AI in the judiciary

India’s mechanisms for dispute resolution and contract enforcement are abysmal.

• There are 47 million pending cases, with a million added every year.
• India ranks 136^th out of 190 countries in the enforcement of contracts. This is significantly lower than China (46th). (World Bank’s Doing Business Report 2020).
• Average time to enforce a contract is nearly four years (1,445 days), more than four times the global average of 358 days.

1. Friction in economic transactions

• India’s lack of effective contract enforcement means a breakdown of transactional trust.
• India copes with the risk of a counter-party reneging on a contract in other ways. This either leads to additional costs or decreases the volume and velocity of transactions.
• Example: The property rental market.
• Landlords in Bangalore often ask for obscenely high-security deposits and many choose to leave their houses vacant in fear of squatters (implying a market breakdown).

2. Vicious cycle that limits state capacity

• The legislative arm of the government makes laws and policy commitments that are beyond the capacity of the executive arm of the government to deliver.
• This leads to the judiciary holding the executive in contempt of the legislature.
• The time spent by the executive in addressing the judiciary’s attempt to hold them accountable further reduces their time and attention to deliver services.
• The three arms of the government are each doing their job as they see it, but end up tying the system in knots and further reducing the overall capacity to deliver.

3. Lack of understanding of the nature of languishing cases

• From petitions and court proceedings to judgments, everything is well documented for at least the past 75 years.
• However, it still lacks a clear understanding of the nature of languishing cases.
• To know what type of disputes, account for most pending cases? and what the different categories are, how they’re changing, or what their root causes are would require an analysis of millions of judgments and tens of millions of petitions.

AI help solve these problems

1. Analyse and categorize cases

• AI can analyze both rulings and filings to identify the major categories in which disputes arise.
• It can even be used to provide in-depth root-cause analysis for these disputes, which in turn could inform procedural and substantive changes.
• Example: If most disputes are over land and mostly involve compensation, then our dispute resolution mechanism could be changed to include arbitration or a specific ombudsman for such common cases.

2. Provide a feedback loop

• Feedback loop between the judiciary and legislature lies broken.
• If clear data can be presented on the caseload impact of every new piece of legislation in near real-time, it would provide needed information on how to improve the design of a scheme.

Challenges of using AI in the Judiciary

• Relevant data must be available in a machine-readable format.
• There are several domain and language-specific nuances that AI needs to be trained for.
• However, optical character recognition and Indic language translation tools have matured.
• Example: Researchers at the Centre for Policy Research and the Open Nyai initiative have already applied AI-focused methodologies successfully to research projects in the Indian legal domain.
• The killer co-pilot app in India might be one built to help judges and clerks in courts improve the speed at which rulings are delivered.

Using AI in the judiciary is necessary for India, and also India has a Chief Justice of India with a clear two-year term who is widely expected to implement significant reforms in the judiciary. The positive link between judicial pendency and economic growth is not easy, but an estimate suggests that even a 10% improvement in judicial efficiency could help unlock at least ₹4,000 crores for India’s GDP.