The Role of Technology in Legal Transformation

Legal technology today is no longer a fringe experiment. It is reshaping how law is researched, practiced, taught, and accessed. Globally, legal systems are integrating AI-assisted tools that help professionals review contracts, conduct due diligence, and automate research. This shift is not about replacing lawyers or judges; it is about augmenting their capabilities and making the legal process more efficient and accessible.

In India, the legal system has started embracing this change. The judiciary has made considerable progress toward digitisation through initiatives like the e-Courts Mission Mode Project, which has introduced e-filing, virtual hearings, and digital case management systems. According to a press release by the Press Information Bureau of India, as of October 2024, over 18,700 district and subordinate courts have been computerised under the e-Courts Mission Mode Project. Additionally, more than 4 crore cases are now available online through the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), which serves as a centralised database of orders, judgments, and case details from all computerised courts across the country. These efforts reflect a strong recognition of the need to modernise.

But despite these efforts, major gaps still remain—and they are deeply interconnected. With over 5 crore pending cases, the scale of India’s justice system alone presents a formidable challenge. Many courts still rely on manual processes. Lawyers outside major cities often lack access to modern research tools. Students, especially from under-resourced institutions, are taught theory without exposure to real-world legal workflows. Judges may spend hours sifting through precedent. And the public—especially in rural and semi-urban areas—often struggles to understand basic legal rights and the nuances of the law as it applies to them.

These are not separate issues. They represent a single, systemic gap in access to justice, manifesting differently for each group. For courts, it’s about reducing backlogs and streamlining workflows. For lawyers, it’s about having tools that save time and raise the quality of representation. For judges, it’s about being able to quickly identify relevant precedents and improve reasoning. For students, it’s about gaining hands-on exposure to the tools they’ll use in practice. And for the public, it’s about demystifying the law so it becomes usable, not just available.

Artificial intelligence and automation offer a real opportunity to close these gaps. They can simplify legal research, automate time-consuming tasks, surface relevant precedents, and explain complex legal ideas in clear, conversational terms. Whether by speeding up judgment preparation or helping someone understand their rights, AI-powered legal tools can deliver impact where it’s most needed. The needs of these groups may differ, but the goal is shared: a legal system that is faster, fairer, and more accessible to all.

CaseMine has been at the forefront of legal technology in India since 2017. At a time when legal AI was still emerging and most legal information was trapped behind paywalls or fragmented across systems, we set out with a clear mission: to expand access to justice through technology. Our credibility stems from having built and refined our platform over years of steady innovation, grounded in a deep understanding of how people actually engage with the law.

We began by ensuring that full-text judgments were freely accessible to everyone. This simple but significant step removed a major barrier for law students, solo practitioners, and the general public—people who previously had to rely on expensive institutional databases or sift through inconsistent sources. But while access solved part of the problem, it didn’t address another: most users needed help understanding what they found.

We quickly recognised that legal accessibility required more than availability—it required clarity. So, we introduced layers of technology that made the law easier to understand. From summarising lengthy judgments and mapping legal citations, to linking related cases and visualising legal principles, we built tools that helped users go beyond reading case law to interpreting it.

Government-led digitisation efforts were critical in laying the foundation for this shift. But digitisation alone was never the end goal—it was a call to action for platforms like ours to make that data usable. When we partnered with NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission, we saw a shared vision: a public-private model where open legal data is transformed into practical tools that can serve everyone, not just the well-resourced.

Today, CaseMine supports a wide spectrum of users across India. We are integrated into the daily workflows of law firms, district courts, academic institutions, and independent professionals. Legal educators use our tools to train students. Trial court judges rely on our platform to refer to precedents. Students use it to learn not just how to search for cases, but how to critically engage with them. And ordinary citizens—who have long been excluded by the complexity and inaccessibility of the legal system—can now explore legal issues on their own terms.

We’ve made these tools available not to serve a niche but to support the entire legal ecosystem. By focusing on usability, open access, and reliability, we’ve shown that legal technology can function as public infrastructure—something essential, inclusive, and built to serve.

Creating real impact in the legal space requires more than just putting information online—it demands thoughtful tools that help people engage with the law in ways that are meaningful, inclusive, and empowering. At CaseMine, we’ve focused on building this kind of impact through three foundational layers of technology, each designed to enhance access to justice from a different angle, while working together to strengthen the system as a whole.

The first layer is our keyword search—one of the platform’s most widely used features—which enables users to retrieve relevant judgments using legal terms, case names, or specific issues. This tool is freely available on CaseMine, ensuring that anyone, regardless of financial resources, can access critical legal information without a paywall. For those who already know what they’re looking for, keyword search delivers fast, targeted results and replaces hours of manual sifting with efficient querying. By removing the cost barrier and significantly reducing the time required to conduct basic legal research, this layer directly supports access to justice—giving students, solo lawyers, and under-resourced users the same foundational tools available to large institutions.

The second layer, extractive AI, allows users to upload complete documents—such as pleadings, research notes, or moot court propositions—and receive results based on the content’s context, not just matching keywords. This is particularly helpful for users unfamiliar with legal search conventions and supports those who may lack formal training. For judges, lawyers, and students alike, this tool makes it possible to engage with the law based on the ideas and arguments they’re developing, not the specific legal language they may or may not know. In doing so, it expands access to justice by reducing the knowledge gap and making research more intuitive.

Building on these capabilities is our third layer: AMICUS, a generative AI legal assistant that allows users to interact with legal content in plain, natural language. AMICUS can summarise judgments, draft contracts, explain doctrines, and structure arguments based on conversational prompts. For students, it offers conceptual clarity and mentorship-style learning. For lawyers, it saves time and strengthens legal reasoning. For judges, it helps surface relevant precedents more efficiently. And for the general public, AMICUS becomes a bridge to understanding the law without needing a legal background. By turning passive access into active comprehension, this layer puts the principles of justice—transparency, clarity, and empowerment—into practice.

Together, these three layers reflect our core belief: that access to justice isn’t just about reaching legal information, but about understanding and applying it. And when technology is designed with that goal in mind, it becomes a tool for inclusion, not just efficiency.

While the efforts of India’s judiciary and the government have made commendable progress in adopting digital infrastructure, fundamental barriers to access remain. Over 70% of India’s population lives in rural areas, where legal services are scarce and legal awareness is low. Even when judgments and statutes are available online, they often remain inaccessible in practical terms—locked behind technical language or difficult-to-navigate systems. Access to justice, in its fullest sense, requires more than availability; it requires comprehension, usability, and reach.

This is why the next stage must be a systemic, nationwide integration of AI-powered legal information tools. Platforms like CaseMine must be embedded not just at the level of higher courts or metropolitan firms, but across district courts, legal aid centres, universities, and public institutions in every region of the country. Such integration means more than software adoption—it involves making structured legal knowledge, supported by AI, a core part of how justice is delivered, taught, and understood.

As legal processes continue to evolve, technology must be part of the foundation—not as an add-on, but as an essential part of how the system functions. A justice system that is truly accessible will be one where information is clear, tools are widely available, and everyone—regardless of background—has the means to participate. That is the direction we continue to build toward.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored article from CaseMine.