New Delhi: India’s judicial system faces a staggering backlog. As of late 2025, district courts alone contend with over 40 million pending cases, while High Courts add 6.2 million more, and the Supreme Court exceeds 90,000 pending matters according to the National Judicial Data Grid. This massive pendency is exacerbated by procedural delays, adjournments and documentation challenges, creating an overwhelming workload for lawyers, who spend countless hours researching precedents and statutes. Estimates suggest clearing the backlog could take centuries without systemic changes, underscoring a critical need for tools to boost efficiency and accessibility. Microsoft is developing AI tools to address this problem, working closely with firms in India.

SCC Online, a leading legal research platform is piloting an AI-powered conversational assistant built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Search, Cosmos DB, and Document Intelligence. This tool allows lawyers or any users to query in plain language, delivering contextualised, cited insights from millions of judgements and databases far faster than traditional Boolean searches. Firms such as Trilegal are integrating Azure-based AI for drafting, summarisation, secure document review and workflow optimisation, freeing professionals to focus on strategy and judgement. These innovations aim to reduce research time, minimise errors and support broader access, including potentially multilingual capabilities for judgements.

Indian lawyers are embracing AI tech

Chief Digital and Information Officer at Trilegal, Dr Avnish Kshatriya says, “In practice, as lawyers embraced technology tools into their daily workflows, adoption accelerated and helped catalyze a wider cultural shift across the firm. This momentum was largely driven by the virtuous cycle of benefits accrued by users adopting them, rather than by top‑down mandates.” CEO and Director of SCC Online, Sumain Malik says “By moving beyond keyword search and toward contextualized reasoning, SCC’s AI aims to help lawyers to move from research to solutions, in order to prepare cases better and faster, reduce unnecessary appeals and gradually ease pendency.”