Where mediation meets IP: A young lawyer’s view of India’s legal shift

Some of the most useful lessons in practice come from clients who do not understand the law. A small textile manufacturer in Kerala once asked me, in the second hearing of his trademark suit, whether the other side could simply be called and told to stop. He was not being naive. He was asking a serious question that the system had no obvious answer to.

The cease-and-desist had  failed. The injunction was pending. The opposite party was in Delhi. He had paid his counsel. He had paid for travel. He just wanted the dispute to end so he could get back to running his business.

That kind of conversation is now more common than the profession likes to admit. The clients have not changed.  The pressures on them have. And on most days, the legal architecture is still asking them to choose between a contested court process and nothing at all. 

The Mediation Act, 2023 was meant to disrupt that binary. Statutes alone cannot make a culture, but they can change the floor on which the culture stands. The Act received Presidential assent on September 15, 2023, with key institutional provisions notified beginning October 9, 2023. Section 5 introduces structured pre-litigation mediation for civil and commercial disputes. Section 27 makes mediated settlement agreements enforceable as if they were court decrees. Section 30 expressly recognises online mediation. Section 31 establishes the Mediation Council of India, whose operationalisation the Centre confirmed to parliament in March 2025.

For lawyers working in intellectual property, these provisions matter more than they at first appear. India's pendency figures are now well past the five-crore mark. The India Justice Report 2025, read with National Judicial Data Grid data, places that figure at over 5.3 crore cases, with around  61 per cent of High Court matters more than 3 years old. IP disputes, which often turn on time sensitive commercial decisions, suffer disproportionately in such a system. A patent owner cannot wait 6 years for an injunction. A startup cannot afford to litigate against an infringer for the same  period it took to build the product.

What the Delhi High Court did in 2022 acknowledged this directly. The IPD Rules, notified on February 24, 2022 after the abolition of the IPAB, did not just create a specialised forum. Rule 37 empowered the IP Division to refer parties to mediation, including to mediators with training in the subject matter, at any stage. The consent of the parties was not made a precondition once the Court was satisfied that an amicable resolution should be explored. Mediation was built into the procedural design rather than left as a discretionary detour. The same approach has since been  adopted at the Madras, Calcutta and Himachal Pradesh High Courts. The Bombay High Court is now framing its own IPD Rules, after stakeholder consultations through 2024 and 2025. 

What is striking, when one looks across these reforms, is how naturally specialisation and mediation are being placed together. Specialised forums attract counsel who know what they are doing. Such counsel usually understand which disputes need adjudication and which need a structured conversation. A trademark co-existence question between two regional players is rarely worth a 5-year suit. A copyright dispute over the use of a stock image is almost always better resolved through a licence and an acknowledgement than through damages. The WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center, which has handled over 5,200 IP and technology disputes, reports that around 70 per cent of its mediations end in settlement. That is not because IP lawyers have gone soft. It is because IP disputes, properly examined, are almost always disputes about future commercial relationships, not just past wrongs.

The case for taking this seriously becomes harder to ignore once one looks at what is coming next. India's IP framework is now being asked to absorb questions the Copyright Act, 1957 was never designed to answer. On December 8, 2025, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal  Trade released the first part of its Working Paper on Generative AI and Copyright, examining  whether the existing statute is equipped to address AI training on copyrighted material. The DPIIT committee examined blanket exemptions, text-and-data-mining  exceptions, voluntary licensing and extended collective licensing. It ultimately proposed a hybrid statutory remuneration model with centralised royalty collection. The paper is open for public consultation; its second part, on AI-generated outputs, is still to come.

At the same time, the Delhi High Court has reserved its order in ANI Media Pvt Ltd v. OpenAI, India's first generative-AI copyright suit. The Court had held 32 hearings and admitted multiple intervenors, including Federation of Indian Publishers, Indian Music Industry, Digital News Publishers Association and Broadband India Forum. Penguin Random House, Bloomsbury and Cambridge University Press have since filed their own suits in Delhi. The dispute is no longer between two parties. It is between two understandings of how creative work should travel through a technological system. 

These are not disputes a single judgment can resolve. They concern continuing commercial  relationships, licensing frameworks, public-interest concerns and a technology that does not pause for the law. Adversarial litigation can settle the legal question. It cannot, by itself, design what  comes after. That work — building licensing structures, opt-out mechanisms, compensation  models — will largely happen outside courtrooms, in rooms where lawyers will be expected to negotiate as much as argue.

A young lawyer entering practice in 2026 has to think honestly about what this means for the kind of career being built. The Bar Council of India has recently recommended a minimum monthly stipend of ₹20,000 in urban areas and ₹15,000 in rural areas for junior advocates - an acknowledgement that the early years of practice are financially difficult. The economics of running purely on contested litigation, particularly in IP, are punishing for a junior. The cases are slow. The senior gets the credit. The bills are uneven. A practice that combines counsel work with structured pre-litigation negotiation, mediation advocacy and IP advisory work is not a compromise. For many of us, it is simply the more honest model of how legal work actually gets  done.

The cultural part of this shift is the harder one. The Indian Bar sees mediation as something that softer lawyers do on the side. That perception will not be changed by another Act of parliament or another set of procedural rules. It will be changed when the lawyers entering the profession now treat mediation not as the absence of a fight, but as a different form of  advocacy. Sitting opposite a client at a mediation table, helping them understand what they actually need rather than what their anger demands, is among the harder things a lawyer can do. It requires legal skill, listening, judgment and the discipline to let go of the courtroom performance that the profession sometimes confuses with substance.

A domestic ecosystem is quietly readying itself for this turn. The Delhi High Court Mediation and Conciliation Centre, the Mumbai Centre for International Arbitration, NITI Aayog's Online Dispute Resolution framework and the WIPO ADR Young programme for younger IP and  dispute-resolution professionals are all working in the same direction. Online mediation, expressly recognised under the Mediation Act, is no longer a theoretical possibility. It is something a small client in Kollam can now expect to use against an infringer in Noida without ever taking a flight. 

The Mediation Act will be tested over the next few years on a single question: whether the Bar uses it. The IPD Rules will be tested on whether mediators with real subject-matter training are made available in numbers that matter. The DPIIT working paper, and the eventual judgment in ANI v. OpenAI, will be tested on whether they leave room for the negotiated arrangements that fast-moving technologies demand. None of this will be settled by a single ruling. 

What is being asked of younger lawyers is simpler than the policy debates suggest. It is to take mediation seriously. Not as a fallback when litigation looks expensive. Not as a procedural box on  the way to a hearing. But as part of the core method by which IP disputes in India will be resolved over the next decade. The client who asks whether the other side can just be called and told to stop is not asking a foolish question. The profession has, for too long, treated it as one.

Joel Kenneth Johnson is an advocate practicing at the High Courts of Kerala and Karnataka, as well as the Supreme Court of India.