In the rush to embed AI into their practice, most law firms have not realised how disruptive this could be to the way in which the business of law has traditionally operated. If we replace junior lawyers with AI that can do their work, how will we train the senior lawyers we need?
The traditional approach to the digital transformation of governance has been to build full-stack solutions that are narrowly geared to addressing specific problems. This is highly inefficient and unless we commit to designing them so that they use shared, re-useable building blocks we are simply not going to achieve the outcomes we need.
The ODR approach can offer the soon-to-be-formed Data Protection Board mechanisms that are digital from the ground up. By integrating various elements of India’s digital public infrastructure into the ODR process adopted, we can ensure that data protection in India is techno-legal from the get-go.
We need technological disruption in India’s legal system. I believe this would reqire us to maximise the potential of online dispute resolution (ODR). The upcoming GST Appellate Tribunal could be a unique opportunity to leverage ODR, transforming the legal profession through efficiency and accessibility.
The Indian Supreme Court’s struggle to decipher a convoluted legal order highlights a broader issue of intentional incomprehensibility in legal language. This complexity often makes laws inaccessible to laypersons. We need plain language reforms, comprehensive lists of laws, explainers for every law, and measures to ease the compliance burdens if we are to make the legal systems more accessible and democratic.
In order to effect the judicial sector reforms that has been outlined in the Digital Courts Vision document, we need to unbundle the workflows in the judicial system and reduce them down to their constituent parts. We should then focus on the outcomes we are looking to achieve and re-assemble them using re-usable building blocks from existing stack infrastructure. Since much of the digitisation of the judicial sector can be expressed in terms of data flows we can achieve this by borrowing from the design of DEPA.
Covid forced courts to adapt to remote working. And they did remarkably well considering the extent to which court processes rely on physical interactions. We need to use this opportunity to radically re-imagine dispute resolution. We can move to written advocacy, use artificial intelligence to make better decisions about litigation strategy - such as the chance of success of an appeal.
We need to radically reimaginine India’s justice delivery system by leveraging digital technology. We should propose written advocacy into the dispute resolution workflow and rely on data-driven reports to inform litigation strategies. How much we can transform is only limited by our courage.
The Indian judicial system is in dire need of reform, with cases piling up and delays becoming a norm. While some digital information exists, the system remains largely analog, lacking crucial metrics and insights. Agami, an organization supporting legal innovation, is working to build a repository for legal data sets, aiming to develop a cloud storage system for collecting, storing, and updating legal data. This project is seen as a first step towards using data to understand and address the inefficiencies in the Indian legal system.
Lawyers often struggle to advise innovative tech businesses due to their risk-averse, backward-looking training. They focus on legal risks, ignoring potential upsides. Modern businesses need lawyers who assess risks realistically, understand regulatory reactions, and advise based on future legal landscapes. Legal education needs a paradigm shift towards solution-focused, forward-thinking training.
