Nov 172 min read

AI in the Apex court : How SUVAS and SUPACE are Shaping India's Judiciary

India has emerged as a pioneer in digitization of its judicial systems such as its courts, tribunals, etc. As of today, the High Courts and Supreme Court of India has completely adopted the digital infrastructure in various domains be it hybrid hearings, e-filing, viewing case status, maintaining digital court records, or court fee payment through a dedicated portal. The development of SUVAS & SUPACE is a part of the e-governance plan which includes the e-courts mission. The main reason behind development of these tools by e-committee of SC is to fulfil 4 main goals – 1) to increase access to justice, 2) to enhance judicial productivity, transparency and processes, 3) to make Indian courts completely digitised, 4) to help advocates by making court work efficient.

Supreme Court Vidhik Anuvaad Software (SUVAS) -

SUVAS is a machine assisted translation tool trained by Artificial Intelligence (AI) that allows for inclusion of regional languages in judicial processes. In the year 2023, Supreme Court began to translate its older judgements, orders and documents into regional languages such as Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, telegu, etc. SUVAS has already translated over 22000 judgements in Hindi, over 3500 in Punjabi, over 1000 in Gujarati and over 1800 in Kannada. By the end of 2023, SUVAS had already translated 31,000 rulings in regional languages. Though these rulings carry a disclaimer at the start that relieves supreme court of all mistakes in it.

While developing the SUVAS software, SC faced a problem which was lack of unified vocabulary for legal jargons in regional languages which led to wide inaccuracies in the translation process. Pertaining to this the Bar Council of India has started work on developing a legal vocabulary that will be used across all courts in India for translation in several regional languages.

Supreme Court Portal for Assistance in Court’s Efficiency (SUPACE) -

SUPACE, developed by the e-committee of the Supreme court, is an AI enabled assistive tool that aims to enhance the efficiency of Indian courts using artificial Intelligence. It is powered to help judges and researchers to work on cases by extracting relevant information, finding judgements, reading case files and drafting court documents. The entire software trains itself by learning patterns every time a prompt or action is made, thereby becoming smarter and more specific.

SUPACE allows judges and researchers to convert text files into PDF files then the chatbot can be used to ask questions from the text such as which para talks about the law, etc. The fact extraction system highlights relevant facts or the judgements quoted or submissions made. An integrated word processor allows for making notes or drafting legal documents and finally a dashboard is present that shows number of cases worked upon, number of tasks to be done by a team or an individual.

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