Now software that helps speedy disposal of cases

Speedy disposal of legal cases and streamlining the judicial system of the country is not an easy task.

But Nitin Aggarwal and Shikhar Sharma, second year students of Cluster Innovation Centre, Delhi University are taking technology into consideration to make it a possibility.

They have designed a software, Legal India Efficient Network Organ (LINO), which can bring down the percentage of court cases pending in the court.

“Petitioners and the lawyers usually are unable to support their case with appropriate legal sections and relevant judgements. The judiciary, moreover, relies on the interpretation of various laws for their applicability and validity on a current case,” says Nitin.

“The onus therefore is on the lawyers and the petitioners to convince the judge. The software shall objectively bring out the relevant sections, laws and previous judicial pronouncements of higher courts for a particular case which shall support the argument at the court and will help in the speedy disposal of cases,” he says.

Nitin and Shikhar, who are working along with Dr Yashomati Ghosh, National Law School of India University, Bangalore,on this project, want to initially provide this software to law firms, law students and other stakeholders in the judicial machinery.

Interestingly, they are focussing on the Right To Information (RTI) at present “We are starting with RTI and consumer cases. Reason being such cases do not require human intervention or considerations like in criminal cases,” says Nitin.|

He explains, “If the Public Information Officers and other appellate officers refuse to give information under RTI, citing that the required information cannot be provided under a particular section, then the person has to approach Centre Information Commission (CIC). Here, comes the role of the software. If law firms are acquainted with this software, they can get an idea of how many people have filed a similar RTI and what was the judgement.It can strengthen their case too.”

“More so, it shall be able to test the applicability of a particular section under which an information is denied. Not only that, the software shall be  able to model a decision for a particular case based on factors such as previous pronouncements, prevalent laws and involved parties,” says Shikhar.

Since, the software will work on data base, Nitin and Shikhar are accumulating it from the CIC website. Given that the data has to be technically managed, the biggest challenge for the software is to take minimum time to search results.

“As we will increase the data, the search time will also increase, which is problematic. Therefore, time and huge data base has to be managed subsequently,” says Nitin, who also attended a conference in US a few months ago to talk about LINO.