Asia's courts battle paperwork overload. Local AI firms see an opening
Courts across Asia are drowning in manual paperwork and handwritten records. Instead of replacing lawyers, AI companies are now targeting the administrative chaos that slows justice itself.
The generative AI legal market will grow by US$2.1 billion between 2024 and 2029, according to research firm Technavio. But the real opportunity for legal professionals lies not in wholesale lawyer replacement-it lies in eliminating the repetitive work that currently falls to junior associates.
Sonam Chandwani, managing partner at KS Legal & Associates, frames it plainly: AI should reduce "the massive amount of repetitive, process-driven work surrounding legal practice." That work has historically been junior associate territory, and concern about job displacement is real within the profession.
Western AI tools don't fit local courts
Anthropic's release of legal plugins in February triggered what investors called the "SaaS apocalypse," wiping billions off software stocks globally. The sell-off hit Indian IT firms hard, erasing nearly US$50 billion in market cap for the sector in February alone.
Yet frontier AI systems like Claude and ChatGPT have a blind spot: they are not trained for multilingual courtrooms, regional accents, or local legal systems. This gap has created space for companies building AI tools specifically for Asian courts.
India-based platform Adalat AI is building courtroom infrastructure tailored to local conditions. In many Indian district courts, judges still handwrite witness depositions because stenographers are unavailable. Some courts must rewrite records because other judges cannot read their colleagues' handwriting.
Adalat AI has trained its speech-to-text systems on Indian legal jargon, accents, and dialects. The platform currently supports 15 Indian languages including Hindi, Malayalam, Odia and Kannada. According to the company's co-founder and CTO Arghya Bhattacharya, the transcription models are "at least 15 per cent more accurate" than generic speech recognition systems used in legal settings.
The company's systems are already deployed in thousands of courtrooms across 10 Indian states. Kerala has mandated its transcription systems statewide.
Building beyond transcription
Adalat AI is also constructing a paperless court management system that digitises the entire case lifecycle, from filing to hearings. Lawyers upload filings digitally. Court officials review documents, flag defects and schedule hearings through a centralised dashboard. Judges access case files and schedules from a single platform instead of navigating stacks of paper.
The company stores all judicial data on servers within India, arguing that sensitive court records should not leave the country. It has received interest from Indonesia and is exploring partnerships across Asia and Africa.
Another India-based startup, Nyai, is building AI systems trained on millions of Indian judgments and statutes. Co-founder Chinmay Bhosale says the platform returns citations with every paragraph. If the system lacks verified data to answer a query, it says so instead of generating inaccurate responses.
Malaysia-based lawyer Nazirah Mannan is in discussions with two startups developing live courtroom transcription systems that would let lawyers and judges instantly access hearing records during proceedings.
The hallucination problem persists
Lawyers across Asia increasingly use AI for research, drafting and compliance work despite ongoing concerns over accuracy. Mannan says Claude is "95 per cent accurate" for legal research compared to rival systems, but she manually verifies every response. OpenAI's ChatGPT and some Chinese AI tools like DeepSeek, she says, "always make up stories."
The risks go beyond fake citations. In a recent US federal court case, a lawyer using Claude received legitimate legal citations but the AI misrepresented the arguments within those cases.
The Supreme Court of India has warned against relying on AI-generated citations in legal proceedings. Yet regulatory frameworks remain unclear across much of Asia. Malaysian law does not clearly prohibit non-lawyers from using AI tools for legal work.
India lacks a dedicated AI policy. Lawyer Salman Waris argues that regulation is inevitable as legal AI adoption accelerates. "You cannot automate accountability," he said.
The junior associate question
Denise Farmer, general manager of Asia Pacific at Clio, warns that firms could begin reducing junior hiring "without thinking about where the next generation of senior practitioners will come from." The concern is not hypothetical-it's already shaping hiring decisions.
Mannan, a Malaysia-based lawyer, is direct about the stakes: "Of course, we worry. It's our bread and butter." Some areas of legal work could eventually become obsolete as automation spreads.
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