Problem / Objective

The pendency of cases in India’s courts has been a long-standing challenge with no viable solution in sight. While the total number of pending cases stands at almost 44 million across all Indian courts, it is higher than 67,000 for just the Supreme Court (as of April 2021). Apart from pendency, there are problems in culling out facts from the records because of the bulky volumes being filed in the court. It was in this backdrop that an Artificial Intelligence Committee of the Supreme Court was constituted in 2019 for onboarding new-age technology of AI/ML in the judicial domain for enhancing the efficiency of justice delivery.

Approach / Solution 

The apex court has launched a pioneering effort to use AI to aid legal research for judges. The artificial intelligence portal SUPACE, short for Supreme Court Portal for Assistance in Courts Efficiency, has been introduced in April 2021. 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.

The AI-powered workflow of SUPACE has four parts: file preview, chatbot, logic gate and notebook. The case files, typically available as PDFs, can be converted into text. The text and voice enabled chatbot helps to give quick overview of the case. The fact extraction system gives information about the case such as overview, chronology, judgement and so on. Finally, an integrated word processor truly makes the tool an end-to-end system.

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.

Impact / Implementation

SUPACE is an online portal that is accessible through a login ID and password. It 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. All high court judges have been recommended to start using SUPACE to enhance their efficiency.

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