From filing defects to live translation, India’s first judicial AI platform is reshaping courts
Written by Jyotsna Bhatnagar
August 30, 2025 08:06 IST
Even as Indian law firms race to adopt artificial intelligence to boost efficiency, Nyaay AI—the country’s only AI platform built specifically for the judiciary—is quietly setting global benchmarks.
Founded in 2022 by PanScience Innovations in collaboration with RailTel, a subsidiary of Indian Railways, Nyaay AI was conceived to tackle some of the most intractable problems plaguing India’s judicial system: mounting pendency, filing defects, procedural backlogs, and shortage of judicial staff.
Two years on, it has emerged as a globally sought-after solution. The platform is already working with the Supreme Court, 16 of India’s 25 High Courts (HCs), as well as the Supreme Court of Singapore, which became its first paid client last year. Countries including the UK and Brazil have approached the firm to help them set up similar judicial platforms.
“Our suite of products spans defect detection, e-filing automation, case clustering, metadata extraction, bench allocation, headnote generation, live transcription, multilingual translation, and judgment analysis—all designed to make courts faster, more efficient, and more accessible,” Anshul Pandey, founder and CEO of PanScience, told FE.
Judiciary-first approach
Unlike most legal AI solutions, which began with law firms, Nyaay chose the tougher judiciary-first route. Pandey recalls a chance meeting with former Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud—credited with fast-tracking the e-Courts project—which shaped that vision. “From the get-go, under Justice Chandrachud’s tutelage, we chose the less lucrative and infinitely more laborious judiciary-first approach, working directly with judges, registrars, and court staff,” Pandey recalls.
That choice has paid off. Today, Nyaay AI not only has a proven adoption model with pilots running in multiple high courts, district courts, and the Supreme Court, but also global validation.
“What makes Nyaay so effective is that it was co-created with the judiciary,” Pandey explains. “Concept notes, pilots, and product roadmaps were all shaped in collaboration with high courts and the Supreme Court, ensuring alignment with real judicial needs.”
Justice Chandrachud underscores the importance of such technology: “The purpose of AI is to make the judicial system transparent, efficient and accessible. Embedding AI has reduced the time between filing and hearing significantly by streamlining procedural aspects of the court system.”
Tackling India’s unique challenges
According to legal experts, the hurdles facing India’s courts are different from those in other countries. Case backlogs are often worsened not by drafting delays but by everyday frictions—petitions rejected for trivial defects, handwritten records resisting digitisation, and non-standardised filing formats. Registry objections vary from court to court, while India’s multilingual reality adds further complexity.
Nyaay AI addresses many of these pain points. Justice Chandrachud points to the automated translation tool SUVAAS, which now translates all judgments into 22 languages. “This is critical in a country where filings, hearings, and judgments flow across multiple languages,” he notes.
Pallavi Shroff, Managing Partner at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas, adds a note of balance: “In India, the future of judicial AI will not be defined by automation alone, but by contextualisation. While AI can reduce friction, there is no substitute for the human judicial mind. The challenge is to blend the two to maximise efficiency.”
Sherbir Panag, co-founder of law firm Panag & Babu, cautions against limiting AI’s use to higher courts. “If I had to prioritise, it would be in registries to make filing and clearing of objections seamless. Tools can be coded to flag defects before filing, saving time for registries and allowing them to focus on accuracy and preventing process abuse,” he says. “It would be short-sighted to restrict AI deployment to assisting judicial work alone.”
Sovereignty, security and scale
Another factor making Nyaay AI adaptable to India’s judicial context is its architecture. It can run on local servers without relying on the cloud—critical for data-sensitive environments like courts where sovereignty and security are paramount.
“The Indian Constitution and judicial framework are structurally unique,” Pandey explains. “Our models are trained on Indian judgments and filings, ensuring they interpret terms, procedures, and precedents in the correct constitutional context—something generic global AI tools cannot offer.”
Unlike point solutions that tackle only fragments of the judicial process, Nyaay AI covers the entire courtroom workflow—from filing and defect detection to case clustering, allocation, live hearings and judgment summarisation. It also integrates smoothly with NIC and e-Courts systems, reducing resistance to adoption.
By proving its technology in courts before extending it to law firms and corporates, Nyaay has inverted the global playbook for legal AI. “We wanted to bridge the judiciary and private sector,” Pandey says. “Nyaay is the first to prove its solutions in courts before taking them to firms—reversing the usual ‘law firm first’ strategy.”
Looking ahead
With India’s judiciary grappling with over 50 million pending cases, the pressure to find systemic solutions is immense. By addressing bottlenecks at the filing and registry level, offering multilingual support, and co-building tools with judges and staff, Nyaay AI is positioning itself as both a domestic reform driver and a global export.
As Justice Chandrachud puts it, “The purpose of technology is to make the judicial system transparent, efficient and access to justice easier.”
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