Making courts transparent: What every litigant should know before filing a case

In this series of articles, XKDR will demonstrate how litigants and lawyers can benefit from augmenting their experience of courts with the objectivity that data can provide.

India's courts are notoriously slow, unpredictable and expensive. We've known this for decades.

The Justice Rankin Committee flagged these issues in 1924 and successive Law Commissions, government initiatives and judicial reforms have tried to fix the problem - special courts and tribunals, alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, digitisation, more judges, more budgets. 

But here’s what we rarely ask: Is any of this working?

Judicial metrics are usually reported and discussed from the viewpoint of the courts - workload pendency and case clearance ratios. What about the people actually using the system? 

It is of paramount importance to see the judiciary as a service provider. Like any other publicly funded institution, it promises outcomes that citizens rely on. But what are these outcomes? Broadly speaking, what really matters to litigants are the courts’ efficiency, predictability and accessibility in resolving disputes. 

Consider an average Indian litigant considering legal action. Before filing, she needs answers to basic questions:

• How long will the case take?

• When will my first hearing be scheduled? 

• How often will I be summoned to court? How many days of work will I lose?

• How likely is it that the case will progress to a judgment?  

• Will the court grant interim relief within six months? Will this be appealed?

These aren’t academic questions. They determine how millions of Indians navigate decisions regarding the justice system. Some give up, just overwhelmed by the complexity and lack of transparency. 

Lawyers and litigants do not often use data to arrive at their decisions. Through three upcoming articles, we hope to convince you - the litigant and the lawyer - of the sheer power of augmenting your subjective and lived experience of courts with the objectivity that data can provide. 

The e-Courts portal and High Court databases publish sufficient information to make some measurements that can serve as direct or proxy answers to the questions discussed above. Despite its deficiencies, the data can be harnessed by lawyers and litigants, transposed into a simple spreadsheet and transformed into powerful insights to arrive at better decisions. 

We can now measure five key metrics across most courts:

1. Time to disposal

2. Number of hearings to disposal

3. Time to first hearing

4. Substantive hearing ratio (% of hearings that advance the case towards resolution)

5. Time between hearings

The first three among these generate insights into the efficiency of the system. Knowing them helps you assess the overall timelines of their case. From this insight, one can make their own subjective evaluation of their individualised costs and benefits in pursuing or continuing a litigation. 

On the other hand, the last two questions point to the predictability of the system. How reliably can one expect the court to deliver on its promises, be it in giving you a few meaningful minutes of its time to make a case or ensuring compliance on some crucial information request from a debtor? 

In the coming days, we’ll describe each of these five metrics to demonstrate what these metrics mean, how you can calculate them yourself and why it matters to you as a litigant or a lawyer when representing your client’s interests. 

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