How is Technology changing the Legal System in India?

How is Technology Changing the Legal System in India?

Artificial intelligence and e-discovery are the sparkling trend of the digital century, which in all imaginable fields of enterprise and industry is used optimally around the globe. The world situation was reshaped and updated by technologies within a decade between 2004 and 2014.

In order to mobilize the desk-oriented, pen-pushing working style of legal practice, technology came to the rescue. In order to work on the court proceedings, legal professionals should not be glued to libraries, record bureaus, telephones, or copiers. Migration from traditional desktop working mechanisms to mobile operations has arisen with the aid of advanced computers, database devices, the internet, search engine software, smartphones, tablets, and kindles.

The easiest investigative work for a case prior to the techie era was time-consuming, requiring manual in-person interviews, library visits, log references, calls, workshops, and multiple days consumed to produce the necessary outcome. In the court halls, the situation was a more complicated, time-consuming, lengthy process. This is one of the big setbacks in the legal environment and a root cause branch for piling pendency in courts. As technology advanced, the legal sector switched rapidly across countries and incorporated it into their activities to communicate with modern times worldwide to remain state-of-the-art in currency and stay tuned to the latest details. The work that took laborious days together to do in the previous period is now done in the new world within hours.

The computerization of applications in the Supreme Court and High Courts was introduced in 1990 by the National Informatics Centre of the Ministry of Information Technology under the Courts Informatics Division. The Listing of Business Information System (LOBIS) contains a calendar of cases to be heard by the courts on the next day, reducing the manual production of the case list process. In implementing this scheme, the basic skeleton back-office process of a court came to a complete re-vamp.

This simplified the chronological order of the dates of filing, the automated generation of cause lists, the classification and publishing of cases with related points of law, the speedy recall of assessments of dismissed cases, instant statistical analyses, the computerized filing of documents.

Computerization of the Supreme court filing counters eased the long queues of advocates, eliminated the difficulties by immediate identification of errors, speedy rectification, estimation of court fees, time constraint, etc. The digital innovation in the Indian judiciary helped the litigants to get their questions about their pending cases answered online. A full text of all the Supreme Court cases published from 1950 to the present date is available online. The litigants and supporters who assess their case status are provided with an integrated voice response system (IVRS).

In compliance with the proposal submitted to the Union Government in 2004 by the then Chief Justice of India, an e-Committee was set up to devise a National Policy on Computerizing the Indian Judiciary and to provide guidance on technology, connectivity, and management requirements. Therefore a report was submitted and the aim of this project was to assist the judicial administration of the courts in streamlining their everyday operations, reducing the backlog of cases, providing litigants with clarity of records, and providing judges with access to legal and judicial databases. This project was designed to be initiated in three stages to provide the overall performance of providing e-courts in the Indian judiciary to speed up the legal mechanism to remove the long pendency of the lawsuit.

Online filing of FIR, interviewing witnesses, suspects, documenting testimony, etc by video conferencing reduces time, distance, expenses, the possibility of engaging with hard-core perpetrators, and helps prosecutions to be easily disposed of. Judges are best able to examine and assess cases with easily applicable precedents and legal prepositions which is available online. With the complex technological development around the globe, as far as the e-courts are concerned, the Indian judicial scenario is traversing towards a silver-line that is subject to the problem of the strength of well-balanced IT help and back-up system that prevents hacking terminals from operations worldwide.

If the technology develops, a refined infrastructure is being built with speedy case disposal, client consultations, and legal review. A paperless framework helps to conserve trees. In a way, it also makes for jobs.

Nevertheless, with respect to legal professionals in some respects and a challenge to the cyber hacking of web portals, there is a concern as to the replaceable feature.

TECHNOLOGY AND COVID-19

The outbreak of the novel Corona Virus Pandemic has made it hard for people to meet in physical form in order to practice social distancing. This has equally hit the court proceedings in India. Making physical Appearances in court has become impossible due to the national lockdown as well. Therefore, it is imperative for courts across the country are to shift to the new normal and explore technological solutions such as online filing of proceedings and court hearings before the judges through video conferencing. After the onset of the worldwide pandemic, the Supreme court asked all the courts to move their proceedings online through the video conferencing method.

This will result in the improvement of service and efficiency in the Judiciary of India in the long run. As it is common knowledge that the Judiciary is facing a backlog in cases as millions of cases are still pending in most of the courts.

Until now, the Judiciary has been using technology mainly to upload cause lists and orders on the online forum for the litigants to access. Therefore, the scope of technology has been rather limited.

After the digital India program was initiated, several measures were adopted and the program widened its geographical boundaries and in turn, increase its efficiency. The Confederation Of Indian Industry(CII) had presented a seminar on the introduction of technology in the Judiciary which will improve the functioning of the Justice System. It will include e-filing-based pleading and virtual trials, which, compared to the tradition of hearings in the physical courtroom by physical paper pleadings, are more time-efficient and environmentally friendly choices.

BY-

Raksha Singhal