A litigant’s guide to courts: Towards a more measurable future

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen how data can illuminate the inner workings of India’s courts.

We began by seeing courts as service providers whose performance should be evaluated like any other public institution (see Part 1). We then examined how to measure efficiency (Part 2) - how long cases take and how many hearings they require, and predictability in terms of how reliably those hearings occur and how often they meaningfully move matters toward resolution.

Together, these measurements form a simple toolkit that any lawyer or litigant can use to anticipate timelines, manage expectations and make smarter litigation choices.

But, this is just the beginning. Courts, by their very nature, generate vast volumes of public data. Properly structured and disseminated, this information could transform how we assess judicial performance, how policymakers target reform, how administrators allocate resources and how lawyers design litigation strategy. 

The Supreme Court’s e-Courts project has, time and again, emphasised the importance of good, high quality judicial data.

If courts embraced these norms in a better fashion, such data would reveal useful patterns and metrics that strike at the heart of the case pendency problem.

A few examples are as follows:

1. Scheduling efficiency: How much judicial time is lost to adjournments on grounds of ‘paucity of time’? How can scheduling be reimagined such that promised hearing slots are delivered without fail and such that these hearings end up substantially pushing the case ahead for the litigant.

2. Compliance tracking: How long do summons and warrants take to be served? How long does it take for final orders to get uploaded? Where exactly can we locate lags and how can they be avoided?  

3. Start and end times of hearings: How much actual judicial attention does each case receive, measured in minutes?

4. Attribution of non-substantive hearings: When hearings achieve nothing, who is responsible for the superfluous hearing? Segregation of these non-substantive hearings can be, broadly, as - absence of parties, absence of witnesses, failure of state agencies or the police, or simply the court running out of time/resources due to inefficient scheduling.

5. Judge change frequency: How often do matters lose continuity because new judges must re-learn the facts? Each bench change costs time and resources for the litigant. This reduces predictability, makes the court less efficient and obstructs speedy justice. 

6. Written submissions and pleadings: For cases that have public, non-confidential filings where disclosure wouldn’t be prejudicial to the parties or the course of justice, written submissions can be goldmines of information. They reveal the full and exhaustive list of relief sought and not just what ultimately gets granted or denied. Publishing them allows academics and practitioners to study which reliefs succeed, which fail and why, thus helping them optimise and prioritise their arguments before the court.

7. Clear disposal type classification: Court websites code cases as “disposed” or “pending”. However, on closer examination, we find that there are shades to disposal which can be segregated and studied separately. Cases where relief is substantially granted are ones disposed as “Allowed”. In contrast, ones where reliefs are denied are “Dismissed” cases. Cases may be “Transferred” to other competent fora or “Remanded” back to a court of first instance. Cases may well be “Settled” on consent terms or “Withdrawn” by the filing party. 

These insights will help us find the most pressing bottlenecks and design targeted reforms. 

While analysing non-substantive hearings, hypothetically speaking, this data may reveal that the blame is attributable mostly to the respondents. This can help us make an informed argument in favour of tightened compliance strictness towards such class/classes of litigants. If one finds that court summons take unjustifiably long to be served, courts can consider outsourcing service of summons,. If each case is heard by more judges than the desirable maximum - thereby wasting court time on context re-establishment - the data point would, by itself, be a strong and self-explanatory clarion call for immediate policy reform on judge rotation and transfers. 

Therefore, instead of broadly hammering on judicial vacations or insufficient bench capacity - which are either misguided or resource intensive suggestions -  attention could be strategically reallocated, cognizant of existing resource constraints. Data-driven analysis is the most reliable anchor we have in this path to reform. This is the only way we can optimise outcomes, given India’s budgetary and developmental realities.

As we’ve emphasised throughout this series, courts are public institutions performing public functions. Indian legal scholarship recently has harnessed available court data to shed light into many of these questions. This has resulted in both data-informed, qualitative arguments to questions like - why do private citizens lose more against the State than before? And, are the effects of the Public Interest Litigation reform really aligned with the larger interests of justice? As well as on more quantitatively tilted issues such as the right methodology to count cases in courts. 

The range of analysis possible, however, will hit a ceiling if not for better data dissemination as has been argued above. Moreover, in the words of ex-Chief Justice of India Dr DY Chandrachud, the next phase of India’s digital transformation of courts is premised on a “whole-of systems approach” that aspires to “make processes more efficient across the lifecycle of a dispute.” This would ensure “seamless transfer of data to the stakeholders.” In other words, not just more data, but better data that is structured, searchable and designed to serve the people who fund and depend on the system. 

A welcome example of such disclosure can be found in the innovative 24×7 ON Courts project at Kollam, Kerala. The court hosts a live dashboard that provides data on filing trends across months, case stage-mapping, the number of advocates and litigants engaging with the court, major disposal types, time-to-event analysis and more.

This quality of dissemination is unprecedented in Indian judicial data. One can see which parts of the judicial process consume the most time and surgically work to solve for those delays. Litigants, in turn, find far greater predictability and can reliably bank on the efficiency of these courts.

For governments or large corporations who are repeat litigants across thousands of matters, unpredictability and inefficiency are mere inconveniences that they factor into their costs. For the ordinary citizen, helpless at the doors of justice, these insufficiencies are life-altering. 

Judicial processes are dragged out, unreliable and unproductive. Imagine going to the doctor only to find your illness worsening through the very intervention meant to cure it. Such is the reality for most litigants today. Just as a patient deserves reliability from her doctor, every litigant deserves accountability from their court. Better data and measurement are the first and most important steps in this journey. Their importance cannot be overstated.

We hope that you, or your lawyer, will use these insights to make better-informed litigation decisions. And, perhaps, to imagine a future where the courts themselves measure up to the dignity of those who seek their justice.

XKDR Forum has worked extensively with datasets from High Courts, Tribunals, and District Courts, producing actionable insights across all five of the metrics discussed above.

More recently, they have collaborated with the High Court of Kerala as part of the PUCAR Collective in the 24x7 ON Courts initiative in Kollam, Kerala. You can read more about their work at https://xkdr.org/field/legal-system 

Feel free to reach out to us at outreach@xkdr.org for queries or suggestions!