ILTN and Jindal Global University's Ideate Lab bring legal AI buyers and builders together to draft a product assessment standard

The Indian LegalTech Network (ILTN) and Jindal Global University's Ideate Lab held the second LegalTech Strategic Roundtable on 20 August 2026 at the Chelmsford Club, New Delhi.

The invite-only session put people who buy legal AI in the same room as the people who build it: law firm partners and legal technology heads, in-house counsel, enterprise CIOs and CDOs, founders, and specialists in AI governance and legal data infrastructure. The aim was practical: agree on what a fair standard for evaluating legal AI tools in India should contain. 

The first roundtable, held on 27 November 2025 with Ideate Lab and ILTN, asked a blunt question: why is legal tech adoption in India so shallow, given the size of the opportunity?

Participants named six barriers:

1. Firms still treat legal tech as a discretionary cost.

2. International tools are built for standardised jurisdictions, while domestic tools are customised so heavily they lose scale. 

3. Buying a tool doesn't mean anyone uses it, and prompting skills are scarce.

4. With no shared metrics for accuracy, hallucination rates or workflow fit, ROI stays unproven. 

5. Case law databases are fragmented and there is no standard legal taxonomy.

6. There is no shared way to recognise vendors that voluntarily adopt governance frameworks.

The session proposed three responses: a state-specific Legal Enablement Toolkit built as a public-private partnership; a Universal Case Law Interface (UCLI), a single authoritative case law repository pitched as "UPI for case law"; and a Product Assessment Matrix, a neutral platform that matches lawyers to tools by practice, firm size and budget.

This session focused on the third proposal: turning the Product Assessment Matrix into a working checklist. Beforehand, ILTN sent tailored questionnaires to 20+ buyers and builders, asking what an honest buyer-builder standard would need to include. Their answers set the agenda.

The discussion covered four questions:

• How to measure ROI from legal AI across practice areas with very different economics, and what it would take for vendors to back their claims with evidence from their own clients.

• What buyers should expect vendors to disclose as standard, such as data handling, model architecture and security certification, and what currently goes unasked.

• Why the governance, security and compliance diligence that enterprise buyers outside legal treat as routine has yet to reach legal tech procurement.

• Why tools get bought and then shelved, and what separates deployments that stick.

Participants broadly agreed that legal tech can't be judged on features alone. Governance, vendor resilience, implementation support and the credibility of the team behind the product all shape buying decisions. Where they split was on how universal any standard can be: the discussion suggested that expectations on governance and ROI need to vary by use case, buyer type and organisational maturity.

"Every buyer asks how they'll know a tool works for their practice. Every builder says they can prove it. This roundtable was about writing down what that proof should look like," said Shreya Vajpei, Founder, ILTN. 

The roundtable report has been published and is available here. Version 1 of the Buyer Framework, developed with roundtable participants, will be published in November 2026.