Asian courts are overwhelmed with administrative procedures. Can AI save them?

Artificial intelligence has been giving lawyers a bad name for years. Chatbots have generated fake case citations and fabricated legal arguments, causing some lawyers who have relied too heavily on the technology to issue an apology.

So why did Anthropic’s new legal plugin released in February help spark what investors are calling the “SaaS apocalypse” that wipes out billions of dollars in software stocks around the world in 2026?

The decline also hit Indian IT and software companies such as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro, wiping out nearly US$50 billion of the sector’s market capitalization in February alone.

In another move in early May, Anthropic released 12 law-specific plugins for Claude.

But the real opportunity for AI is not to completely replace lawyers, says Sonam Chandwani, managing partner at KS Legal & Associates. Rather, it is “reducing the large amount of repetitive, process-driven work involved in the practice of law.”

Currently, much of it is handled by junior employees, who are increasingly concerned that these new plugins can affect their work.

“The fear in this profession is real,” says Dennis Farmer, Clio’s general manager for Asia Pacific. She warns that companies could start cutting back on junior recruitment “without thinking about where the next generation of senior practitioners will come from”.

“Of course we are worried. It is our sustenance,” says Malaysia-based lawyer Nazira Manan. She worries that some areas of legal practice may eventually become obsolete.

Go local or west?

Research firm Technavio predicts that the generative AI legal market will expand by USD 2.1 billion between 2024 and 2029, growing more than 34% annually.

Anthropic’s announcement of a new plugin increases competition in an already cash-rich field. For example, US-based Harvey raised US$200 million in March at a valuation of US$11 billion.

Meanwhile, incumbents are rapidly reinventing themselves. Founded in 2008 as a legal practice management platform, Clio has repositioned itself as an AI-first legal operating system. In 2025, it acquired AI research company vLex for US$1 billion.

Still, companies across Asia say there is a huge opportunity in automating the day-to-day operations of local court systems.

It remains to be seen whether these companies can build models that outperform their Western counterparts, but several Indian AI companies, for example, are building tools tailored to local courts. These include courtroom transcription software, paperless case filing systems, and legal research platforms trained in local laws and local languages.

The founders of India-based platform Adalat AI argue that frontier AI systems are poorly adapted to emerging markets. Claude or ChatGPT may be good at summarizing contracts, but they are not trained in India’s multilingual courts and regional accents.

This paves the way for localized AI infrastructure, which could be a major competitive advantage as courts across Asia accelerate their digitalization efforts.

The same approach is starting to gain traction in other markets, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, where courts face similar challenges.

AI battles in the courtroom

“Justice is a matter of logistics,” says Utkarsh Saxena, co-founder and CEO of Adalat AI. Courts in South and Southeast Asia are often burdened with paperwork and manual filing systems, which often cause administrative delays.

Saxena said that in many of India’s district courts, judges still take witness depositions by hand because stenographers are not available. In some cases, courts may have to rewrite records because other judges cannot read their colleagues’ handwriting.

To address this, Adalat AI is building court infrastructure including live transcription systems and paperless filing tools customized for Indian courts.

Adalat AI, a not-for-profit company, says it funds its activities through philanthropic grants, foundations and CSR funds.

Unlike many legal AI startups that rely on APIs from big tech companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, Adalat AI says it builds its own AI models in-house.

The platform trains speech-to-text systems based on Indian legal terminology, accents, and dialects and currently supports 15 Indian languages, including Hindi, Malayalam, Odia, and Kannada.

According to co-founder and CTO Arghya Bhattacharya, the company’s transcription model is “at least 15% more accurate” than typical speech recognition systems used in legal settings.

The company says its system is already used in thousands of courtrooms across 10 states in India, with Kerala making its transcription system mandatory throughout the state.

The company is also building a paperless court management system that digitizes the entire lifecycle of a case, from filing to trial. Lawyers can digitally upload filings, and court staff can review documents, report deficiencies, and schedule hearings through a centralized dashboard.

Meanwhile, instead of navigating mountains of paperwork, judges can access case files and case schedules from a single platform.

Adalat AI stores all judicial data on servers located within India and maintains that confidential court records should not leave the country. The founders told Tech in Asia that they have also received interest from countries including Indonesia, and are exploring partnerships across Asia and Africa.

This is not surprising. The same localization challenges are prevalent across Southeast Asia, where courts operate in diverse languages ​​and legal systems for which Frontier AI models are not specifically trained.

Manan, a Malaysian-based lawyer, said he is in talks with two startups developing live court transcription systems that give lawyers and judges instant access to trial transcripts during proceedings.

Another India-based startup, Nyai, is building an AI system trained on millions of Indian judgments and laws.

“With Nyai, you enter a research query into the system and it gives you 10 pages of output, with every paragraph citations,” says lawyer and co-founder Chinmay Bhosale.

If the system doesn’t have enough verified data to answer a query, it will simply tell you so, rather than generating an inaccurate or hallucinatory response, he says.

Beyond fake quotes

Lawyers across Asia are increasingly using AI tools for research, drafting, and compliance tasks, despite continuing concerns about illusions and inaccurate legal outcomes.

Manan says Claude is “95% accurate” compared to competing AI systems for legal research, but she still manually verifies every answer. Some Chinese AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DeepSeek, “are constantly making up stories,” she says.

Nyai’s Bhosale argues that most mainstream AI chatbots are designed to be “helpful” rather than legally trustworthy.

But the risks extend beyond false citations.

In recent U.S. federal court cases involving attorneys who used Claude, AI provided legitimate legal citations but misrepresented the claims contained in those cases.

Courts and regulators are increasingly paying attention to the risks of AI in the legal field. India’s Supreme Court has warned against relying on AI-generated citations in court cases.

Still, the regulatory framework remains unclear in many parts of Asia. Mannan said Malaysian law does not yet explicitly prohibit non-lawyers from using AI tools in their legal work.

India-based lawyer Salman Waris says India also lacks a dedicated AI policy, arguing that regulation is inevitable as legal AI adoption accelerates.

“Accountability cannot be automated,” Wallis says. asian technology