Five crore cases are pending. The bottleneck is not argument — it is paperwork.

India’s district courts carry more than 5.12 crore pending cases, and new filings outpace disposals every month. For the firms working inside that system, the constraint is drafting, research and client administration.

The backlog compounds by design

In the most recent month recorded on the National Judicial Data Grid, 29,25,668 cases were instituted in India’s district courts and 24,00,384 were disposed of. That is a net addition of roughly 5.25 lakh cases in a single month. The pending pool stands at 5,12,19,671 — 1,12,86,510 civil and 3,99,33,161 criminal.

Age is the real measure

38% of pending cases are less than a year old and 23% are one to three years. But 16% have been pending five to ten years and 9% — 47,82,445 cases — for more than a decade. A further 49,26,775 cases, 10% of the total, are flagged as excessively dated. For a practice, that is not an abstraction: it is files that must be tracked, re-read and re-argued years after they were opened.

Where the billable hour actually goes

81% of last month’s disposals were uncontested. The work that consumes a practice is overwhelmingly procedural — drafting, filing, service, compliance, chasing dates — rather than advocacy. That is precisely the layer software reaches. The same is true next door in accounting and audit, where filing calendars, notices and evidence collection follow the same pattern.

Why grounding matters more here than anywhere else

A general-purpose chatbot that invents a section number is worse than useless in a profession where a wrong citation can sink a matter. This is the one sector where the difference between a fluent answer and a sourced answer is the entire product.

Our products, mapped to this sector

Legal and professional services is the sector our own products were built for first.

Related: AI agents for legal firms  ·  AI agents for CA & accounting  ·  India’s ₹1 lakh crore companies

We do the analysis. Then we build the system.

Every engagement opens with a ₹9,999 AI Transformation Assessment — credited back in full — and ends with software running in your practice.

Sources

Every case figure on this page is taken from the National Judicial Data Grid, the Government of India’s official judiciary dashboard, maintained by the National Informatics Centre under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Figures reflect the district-court dashboard as retrieved on 28 August 2026 and move daily.

• National Judicial Data Grid — district courts
• NJDG — High Courts
• Department of Justice, Government of India