Why is tech adoption failing at the High Courts? The answer lies in process reforms

Recently, the Supreme Court of India announced a series of AI-powered reforms for judicial administration. These include partnerships with High Courts to update case statuses based on orders from trial courts, High Courts and the Supreme Court.

The announcements are part of a wider trajectory of technological adoption in courts (since the launch of the e-Courts project in 2005) that promise a quick-fix for multiple administrative tasks and challenges (like delays and complexities of litigation processes for litigants). At the High Courts, the on-ground reality of these promises paint a far less fruitful picture.

Despite widespread technological adoption to usher in the era of e-filing, serving of notices through emails, video conferencing and live-streaming of proceedings, litigants still struggle to navigate processes in High Courts. Most litigants need to depend on their lawyers to understand complex, hard-to-follow litigation processes, making litigation an expensive and time-consuming activity. This is because the very frameworks governing litigation processes before the High Courts are broken, incoherent and outdated.

This piece explains how problems with current High Court litigation processes frustrate meaningful technology adoption and make a case for process reforms as a crucial prerequisite for effective integration.

Adoption of technology at the High Courts took place in an ad hoc and piecemeal fashion. The consequences of adopting technology in this manner is not simplicity, but additional complexity of procedures for litigants. Technology is adopted in a way that has contributed to the problems of litigation processes at High Courts, instead of simplifying them.

For example, e-filing is a process that has received sustained attention in technological adoption over the years. E-filing work for Phase III of the e-Courts project (2023 - 2027) has now been budgeted for ₹215.97 crore.

However, the manner in which e-filing has been implemented has resulted in duplication of work. At present, some High Courts (like Allahabad) require lawyers and litigants to sign every page of the pleadings. Such pleadings will need to be printed, signed and scanned to be e-filed. If the resulting scans are not machine-readable, any further processing on these documents becomes difficult.

What complicates the process even further is that e-filing alone does not count as a case being filed. Most High Courts require lawyers to file cases physically as well. Since digital signatures are not accessible for all lawyers and litigants, a simpler process could involve only the last page of the pleadings being physically signed to allow the lawyers to upload the pleadings directly from their computers to the e-filing dashboard.

An example of a process that urgently needs to be updated is the transmission of trial court records. To decide appeals against trial court decisions, High Courts require trial courts to send the records of that case from their records. Some High Courts, like the Calcutta High Court, have observed that these transmissions are often time-consuming. Trial courts are still sending case records in physical form to High Courts. The digital transmission of such records would save considerable time and effort.

Similarly, efforts to introduce service of notice by email have taken this path. For example, the Karnataka government’s new rules for service of notice by email seem to still be rooted in paper-based processes. The litigant is required to still pay a process fee for service by email even though there is no printing or postage cost involved.

DAKSH has published the Model High Court Rules, reimagining the framework governing High Court litigation processes. The Model Rules focus on creating a seamless framework for litigation rules, integrating technology to simplify processes.

To this end, the Model Rules provide customised dashboards to different users. The Rules envisage digitally native processes. Pleadings can be filed,  court and process fees can be paid and scrutiny can be done digitally. The format of filing and the type of files (OCR-searchable PDFs) have been standardised for ease of use. Significantly, these dashboards aid lawyers with tracking information and updates of their cases, as opposed to making multiple visits to the registry. Here, technology is used to create cohesion between the stages of filing, notice and further communication with the registry.

A major pain point or bottleneck lies in the service of notice. A litigant filing a case can, for example, only serve notice through one mode at a time (such as process servers, RPAD). When a notice comes back unserved, the litigant must pay the process fee all over again and resend the notice through another means. This allows respondents to prolong the cases by evading notice, making notice a key bottleneck.

The Model High Court Rules addresses these pain points by utilising technology. It enables multiple modes of service, and triggers automatic service of notice by email for respondents who are governmental agencies or public sector undertakings. This enables effective use of technology for a litigant category that comprises a majority of cases at High Courts.

High Courts have undertaken and been a part of systemic initiatives to incorporate technology into their workings. However, technological adoptions have not led to more efficient processes. Aa part of the problem lies in their failure to undertake rigorous process reforms.

Without a coherent procedural framework that prioritises future-readiness, coherence and simplicity to guide litigation, attempts to meaningfully integrate technology in High Courts’ procedures will continue to fall flat.

The High Courts are now looking ahead and gearing up to adopt more AI into their workings. However, a far better (if counterintuitive) approach will require them to look back and to establish procedural prerequisites to harness the potential of technology safely and efficiently.

Lakshmi Menon is a Research Associate at DAKSH.

Views are personal.