Three decades after digitisation, legal technology faces its real test

For nearly thirty years, Indian law has lived in a state of digital familiarity. Judgments moved from shelves to screens. Statutes became searchable. Filing systems went online. And yet, for all this technological movement, the experience of legal work itself has remained largely unchanged.

Lawyers still sift through volumes of material to find relevance. Judges still bear the cognitive burden of navigating precedents, contradictions and context. Citizens still struggle to understand how the law applies to them. The tools improved, but the relationship between humans and the law did not fundamentally change.

Saakar S Yadav, Managing Director, Lexlegis.ai, on the present and future of legal technology.

Yadav was speaking at a Society of Indian Law Firms (SILF) event, where the evolving role of technology in India’s legal system was placed under sharp scrutiny.

Yadav’s starting point was not technology, but memory. He recalled growing up around the practice of law as it existed long before digitisation, a world of handwritten notes, carefully reasoned arguments, and deliberate judgment. Law, he suggested, has always been an exercise in human reasoning rather than mechanical retrieval.

Digitisation solved an important problem: access. It made information available at scale. But it also created a new burden. Lawyers and judges were required to adapt themselves to machines, learning search syntax, structuring queries, and navigating databases designed around computational logic rather than legal thought.

In this sense, technology advanced in speed, but not in empathy.

Artificial intelligence, as Yadav framed it, represents the first genuine inflection point since the move from books to databases. Unlike earlier systems, AI has the capacity to engage with intent, context, and reasoning patterns, the very elements that define legal thinking.

This shift is not merely technical. It changes who bears the cognitive load. Instead of forcing legal professionals to think like machines, AI has the potential to adapt itself to how law is actually practised, through issues, facts, rules, exceptions, and judgment.

The distinction matters. In law, relevance is more valuable than volume and clarity more useful than completeness. A system that understands this does not overwhelm. It assists.

Yadav was particularly critical of how “user friendly” is often understood in legal technology. A cleaner interface or a simpler dashboard, he argued, does not make a system usable in any meaningful legal sense.

The legal ecosystem has no single user. Judges, litigators, prosecutors, regulators, law enforcement officers, and citizens engage with the law in fundamentally different ways. Treating them as a homogenous audience leads to tools that serve none of them particularly well.

True usability in law means reducing cognitive strain, surfacing context, and delivering answers that align with the role and responsibility of the user. A judge does not need every citation, only the ones that matter. A prosecutor needs patterns, not pages. A citizen needs clarity, not complexity.

AI, when designed responsibly, enables this shift from information overload to decision support.

From these observations emerged a simple but powerful framework. Legal work, across institutions, largely revolves around three activities.

ASK: asking questions of law, research, interpretation, and clarification.

INTERACT: extracting actionable insights from within documents, analysing, comparing, and executing changes on documents.

DRAFT: drafting, translating legal reasoning into opinions, pleadings, orders, and agreements.

Technology that does not align with these workflows, Yadav suggested, inevitably creates friction rather than efficiency.

Perhaps the most consequential part of the address concerned trust.

As AI adoption accelerates, so do concerns around confidentiality, data sovereignty, and institutional control. Legal work frequently involves draft judgments, investigative strategies, and privileged material, information that cannot be exposed to opaque external systems without undermining public confidence.

Cloud dependent AI models, Yadav cautioned, raise serious questions in this context. Where does the data go. Who controls inference. What jurisdiction governs access.

For institutions bound by constitutional responsibility, these are not abstract concerns. They go to the heart of judicial independence and due process.

This is why he characterised offline AI not as a technological preference, but as a constitutional imperative, a model that ensures data never leaves institutional control, aligns with domestic data protection frameworks, and preserves the sanctity of legal decision making.

Equally important was the boundary Yadav drew around AI’s role. Artificial intelligence must assist human judgment, not replace it.

At its best, legal AI functions like an ideal junior, tireless, organised, capable of handling repetition and surfacing inconsistencies, but never authoritative. Decisions, accountability, and ethical responsibility must remain with those entrusted by law.

Crossing that line, he warned, risks eroding the very legitimacy technology is meant to support.

That responsible design can have real institutional impact is not theoretical. Yadav pointed to earlier work within the National Judicial Reference System, where intelligent clustering of appeals revealed thousands of matters already settled by higher courts but still pending elsewhere. The result was tangible backlog reduction, achieved without compromising judicial discretion.

The lesson was clear. When technology respects institutional boundaries, it can strengthen, rather than disrupt, the system.

As Indian law firms, courts and legal departments confront the next phase of technological adoption, the question is no longer whether AI will enter the legal system. It already has.

The real question is whether it will be deployed with restraint, trust, and constitutional sensitivity.

The challenge before the legal profession, Yadav concluded, is not to build smarter machines, but to build systems that understand the human foundations of law, systems that enhance judgment, protect confidentiality, and bring the citizen closer to justice.

In that sense, legal technology’s real test has only just begun.

Saakar S Yadav is a Founder and Managing Director at Lexlegis.ai.

This is a sponsored post.