How AI is Fighting India's Court Backlogs: Inside Adalat.ai's Tech Revolution

Speaking to ANI on the sidelines of the Carnegie Global Technology Summit 2025, Co-founder and CEO Utkarsh Saxena outlined the company's progress, impact, and expansion efforts to reduce court delays and pendency.

Saxena said that although India's judicial delays stem from multiple structural and operational issues, one of the most significant contributors is the persistence of manual, clerical and paper-based processes.

These slow workflows, he noted, consume extensive time in courtrooms and divert judicial resources.

"Court delays is a complex multi-dimensional problem. There are many reasons why it happens, but one big contributing factor is the fact that we have a lot of manual and clerical processes, paper-based processes that slow the system down and clog the system. So, Adalat AI is building AI and tech solutions that automate these manual processes to enable judges to have more time to do decision-making and clear cases," Saxena told ANI.

One of the company's flagship innovations is an advanced legal speech-to-text transcription system made for Indian courts. Many lower courts lack stenographers, resulting in slow, error-prone manual typing of witness examinations and testimonies, often causing hearings to stretch over days, he explained.

Saxena highlighted that Adalat.ai's multilingual transcription tool has significantly eased this bottleneck.

"For example, transcription is a big challenge in courts. There are no stenographers in many courts. They type very slowly and because in the court everything needs to be written down it can take very long to clear just a simple cross-examination of a witness and so we've built a legal 'speech to text' transcription tool that helps the court record the testimony in multiple Indian languages, so that all the delays that happen go down and now a court is able to record six to eight 164 statements in a day as compared to two statements earlier in increasing the daily and weekly output of courts through that process increasing the throughput of cases in the system," he said.

Adalat.ai's solutions are currently deployed in 4,000 courtrooms, representing one-fifth of all district courts nationwide.

The venture has formal partnerships with nine state governments and is in advanced discussions with five additional states to further scale deployment, he said.

Saxena announced that Kerala issued an official mandate, effective November 1, to integrate Adalat.ai's technology across its courts.

- ANI