AI takes on the paperwork clogging India’s court system

Adalat AI says its tools are being used in 6,000 courtrooms across 11 states, speeding up the pace of the justice system. 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 whet