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India’s courts are drowning in documents — and even recording witness testimony can create a bottleneck. “It’s writing, writing, writing, all day,” says Kerala judge Suresh Babu in the annual report of nonprofit Adalat AI. That type of inefficiency matters: In 2024, nearly three-in-four people in prison in India were being held without a conviction as they awaited processing. Adalat AI builds speech-recognition software trained on India’s legal system, alongside AI tools to manage cases and court documents. Co-founder and CEO Utkarsh Saxena calls his team the “plumbers of the court system”, the ones who fix and unclog the pipes. For example, when a witness answers a question, the judge can now dictate what should be recorded by Adalat. Then, both parties check the text on screen before moving on. Those transcripts are then submitted as the court’s official record of the testimony. “We aren’t automating decision-making, we’re automating the administrative processes to give judges back time to do the things that actually matter,” Saxena says. The test will be whether faster paperwork leads to shorter cases. In internal studies, Adalat has seen major improvements in the number of witnesses heard and orders issued at courts that use its tools, which have reached more than 6,000 courtrooms across 11 states. A randomized evaluation with research center J-PAL is currently underway. Some jurisdictions now mandate the use of Adalat AI technology for recording witness testimony. A similar push is happening in Singapore, where courts introduced AI-powered transcription tools in December 2023.
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