Court verdict in a jiffy?

Can a judgment be delivered in seconds? An IIT Kanpur’s research paper says artificial intelligence could be the answer.

A team of researchers led by Ashutosh Modi and Arnab Bhattacharya at IIT-K’s computer science department developed a system that not only predicts what should be the final decision of a court case, but also how one arrives at that decision. An AI-enabled automated system that can assist judges by suggesting outcome of an ongoing court case may help in expediting the judicial process. For this, they have created a new corpus of 35,000 legal documents from the Supreme Court: the Indian Legal Documents Corpus.

The research paper titled ‘Indian Legal Documents Corpus based Court Judgment Prediction and Explanation’ states that the advent of AI-enabled technology brings “hope to the legal system”.

“This is one of the first Indian Legal Corpus of SC cases created for case prediction and explanation. Moreover, this is an ongoing process and the corpus is being actively built. The ILDC is created and annotated with court decisions. A portion of the corpus (a separate test set) is annotated with gold standard explanations by legal experts,” said Arnab Bhattacharya, professor of computer science at IITK. “The next step is Court Judgement Prediction, for this specialized deep learning-based models are developed. Prediction is followed by an explanation for the decision, using unsupervised algorithms. Explanations given by the algorithm are compared with the explanations annotated by legal experts.”

This research was done by including professor Kripa Ghosh from Indian Institute of Science Education and Research-Kolkata and Shouvik Guha, a law professor from West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences as part of the team and it highlights how symbiosis between legal experts and AI researchers could develop practical solutions for the legal system of India.

For the record, the National Judicial Data Grid states, there are 5.75 million cases pending in the high courts and 38.15 million in the district courts across India. Of these, more than 4.5 million cases have been pending for more than 10 years. “The goal of this model is to assist the legal community and not replace judges. The AI model can augment the process and bring about faster decision making, allowing for clearing up cases,” added Bhattacharya.