e-filing is foundational to the building of a truly digital judiciary. It has been endorsed as a one-stop solution for the judiciary to reduce its carbon footprint and increase efficiency at the source.

How much the judiciary is banking on it is evident from the sizable budget allocated to it under Phase III of the eCourts project. On paper, e-filing seems to be a success. In its third iteration, it has been formally adopted by 25 jurisdictions. The latest count of e-filed cases as of August 2024 is 49,58,821 (38,63,873 for district courts and 10,94,948 for High Courts) and a total of 1,365 e-Sewa Kendras have been built across district courts to aid in e-filing.

While impressive at first glance, there is a need to look beyond the numbers and see how e-filing is actually implemented in district courts to assess its efficacy. With this intent, the JALDI team at Vidhi visited four district courts across Karnataka as well as the High Court of Kerala and held consultations with various stakeholders. Surprisingly, most of the advocates consulted in Karnataka preferred physical filing to e-filing. They only e-filed cases when mandated by the parent High Court. While it may be tempting to dismiss this as sentimental traditionalism, the primary reason found was that e-filing introduced unnecessary delays and complexity to the filing process.

Issues with e-filing

At present, to “e-file” a case, the lawyer must prepare a physical plaint, scan each page of the plaint and compress the entire file to 20 MB before uploading it to the portal. In case of errors, she is required to make corrections to the physical file and re-scan and re-upload it, essentially doubling the average lawyers’ work. e-filing has also deepened existing socio-economic fault lines. Advocates with access to proper technology and office clerks may find e-filing a minor inconvenience. However, for individual practitioners with limited resources and digital literacy, it is a cumbersome process that detracts from their actual work. e-filing is also viewed by older clerks as a threat to their jobs as they find the system difficult to use and limited training is provided by the courts to help them. All the while, from scrutiny to execution of decree, the system continues to rely on physical files, rendering e-filing redundant.

In a sense, the e-filing system embodies the state of technology integration in the Indian judiciary - piecemeal and ad-hoc. In such a scenario, technology solutions tend to work in silos, rather than speak with each other to create a unified digital system. For instance, e-filing should ideally have resulted in automatic generation of summons. Instead, pending clerks are required to generate summons separately for each defendant and manually input information pertaining to advocates. Piecemeal introduction of technology also results in duplication of work for end-users, as evidenced above. Introduction of technology solutions should, therefore, be preceded by a re-engineering of judicial processes to make them truly conducive to technology integration.

Redesigning e-filing

The hallmark of a well-designed process is that it not only streamlines the current stage, but also optimises later stages to benefit end-users. When redesigning the e-filing portal, the Justice, Access and Lowering Delays in India Initiative (JALDI) at Vidhi focused on all users, especially the judges, to create processes that enhance efficiency throughout civil litigation. For this, we took inspiration from the dashboard developed by the High Court of Kerala, as they have managed to introduce such features.

While the redesigned e-filing system should definitely provide customised dashboards based on user needs, additional features are required to optimise efficiency. For example, there is a need to filter cases suited for alternate dispute resolution (ADR) at the filing stage, rather than during hearings under Section 89 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908. Advocates should present ADR options to clients before filing, informing them of the costs and timelines. One way that this can be done is by integrating the litigant and advocate’s dashboard. The litigant’s dashboard would consist of an explainer video regarding the available ADR methods and only if they consent that their advocate should still go ahead with filing a civil suit, will the advocate be able to proceed.

Another feature that could especially help judges later is templatised pleadings. While templates are available in the e-filing version 3.0, this is not what we are referring to. In the model thought of by Vidhi’s JALDI team, advocates would file the pleadings by filling out a templatised form similar to a Google form. This would help judges easily find information under predefined categories, when they need to frame issues or quote any part of the pleadings in their judgments.

While artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) tools currently are not advanced enough to do legal research, they can certainly be used to assist the advocates with determining the appropriate forum for a case as well as the court fee payable at the time of filing. These aspects are carefully scrutinised by the court staff when a case is filed and if they are incorrect, their correction by the advocate can delay the filing and subsequently the first listing of the case. By allowing an ML tool to assist for these purposes at the time of e-filing a case, substantial time can be saved as the advocate would usually be able to correct any such mistakes before filing the case.

Conclusion

While the solutions described above are important examples of how technology can help maximise efficiency in the judicial system, it is important to remember that simultaneous changes in rules are required to ensure seamless implementation. Technology can only be completely adopted if professional and dedicated IT individuals are able to assist the stakeholders with the same. The JALDI team has proposed several  solutions, both simple and innovative, for not just the stage of e-filing, but also all other stages of civil litigation.

Jyotika Randhawa is a Research Fellow at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.

Atishya Kumar is a Senior Research Associate at Daksh and a former Research Fellow at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.

Views are personal.

You can read more of their solutions published as a series of consultation papers called ‘Civil Litigation for the Digital Age’.