The Artificial Intelligence committee of the Supreme Court, constituted in 2019, is chaired by Justice L Nageswara Rao. In his words, “…a need was felt for onboarding new age, cutting edge technology of machine learning and artificial intelligence in the judicial domain for enhancing efficiency, productivity of justice delivery.”

While the use of Language Technology to translate SC judgements to vernacular languages is already underway, the apex court has launched a pioneering effort to use AI to aid legal research for judges. This integration of artificial intelligence in the judicial domain is aimed at reducing pendency and enhancing efficiency and productivity of justice delivery.

The artificial intelligence portal SUPACE, short for Supreme Court Portal for Assistance in Courts Efficiency, has been launched by the CJI SA Bobde, who describes it as a “perfect blend of human intelligence and machine learning.” 

SUPACE is AI-enabled assistive tool that can augment the efficiency of the legal researchers and judges to work on cases, extract relevant information, read case files, manage teamwork and draft case documents. 

“SUPACE is one of a kind solution that is fully customisable and behaves uniquely like its user. The AI within it adapts and adopts user behaviour based on incremental usage of the platform. This is one of the first examples of mass customisation in the world,” says Manthan Trivedi, member of the SC’s AI committee and a key figure behind this initiative. “It is able to find facts, issues and points of law from thousands of pages of documents in a matter of seconds. This is going to play a pivotal role in saving time and bringing unbounded efficiency in arriving at a decision. Most importantly, SUPACE provides a digital infrastructure that can further the efforts and fulfil the purpose of the digitisation movement happening across the country. SUPACE, with its robust workflow and machine learning abilities, will truly unlock the unutilised power of digitsation,” he adds.

Justice NV Ramana, incoming Chief Justice of India, says, “We are already burdened with so much of pendency. Apart from pendency, there are lot of problems, particularly finding facts and culling out of facts from the records because of the bulky volumes nowadays being filed in the court. To take out the important facts or the issues which the parties raised with the help of this tool is very easy. I think in the course of time, we will understand better, when we start using this tool.”

How SUPACE works

It is an online portal that is accessible through a login ID and password. In one glance, it shows a summary of all cases available in the database. All files and documents are displayed for easy access. The tasks are displayed along with details of progress and people. A universal search allows to scan through all the files in the database.

The AI-powered workflow of SUPACE has four parts: 

• File Preview: The case files, typically available as PDFs, can also be converted into text. There is also a search tool to browse through all files.
• Chatbot: The text and voice enabled chatbot helps to give quick overview of the case, in a matter of minutes, by answering simple questions such as “What is the matter about?” or “Which fundamental rights of the petitioner are violated?” Chatbot can switch between documents to fetch the right answer while allowing the user to check the source of the answer. This bot suggests further questions to be asked for better understanding, and the entire question summary can be printed by the user.
• Logic Gate: This fact extraction system for the chatbot is divided into four parts: Synopsis, FAQs, Evidence, and Case Law. These give information about the case such as overview, chronology, judgement and so on. With enough training and refinement of the algorithm, there will come a time when any and every question, factual or contextual, will be answered by the chatbot.
• Notebook: This is the integrated word processor which truly makes the tool an end-to-end system. A brief summary of the case can be prepared by simply collating all information auto-extracted from the database using the AI. In addition, voice dictation can be used to prepare notes on this comprehensive drafting tool. Therefore, without typing a word, a summary document is ready as a soft or hard copy. 

This entire system is subject to training by human users. The AI system learns patterns based on the information that's annotated and extracted – and that’s how it's trained. All high court judges have been recommended to start using SUPACE to enhance their efficiency.

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