Motivation With the advancement of the Web and an increasing number of legal documents being available digitally, it is now intractable for legal practitioners to manually find relevant information (prior cases, related acts/statutes etc, law reports etc.) that would assist an ongoing case. Although there exist legal search systems like Manupatra, Westlaw India, the systems are not very efficient (e.g., only allowing keyword search). On discussing with legal experts, we found out that they still mostly rely on Google search to find relevant documents. Thus, a domain-specific search system is required for legal search and retrieval, especially in the Indian context. This project is about developing such a system. The system should ideally cater to both domain experts (e.g., lawyers who want to find prior cases to cite during an ongoing case) and common people (who are facing a problem and want some legal opinion).
Objective India follows the Common Law system, which says that the decision of a case will be based on the decisions given to similar prior cases. Hence, there are two primary sources of law : (1) Statutes/Acts, which are the laws made by the legislature, and (2) Precedents or previous case judgements, which contain solutions to similar legal problems, not indicated in the Statutes/Acts. Precedents help a lawyer understand how the Court has dealt with similar scenarios in the past, and prepare the legal reasoning accordingly. Hence lawyers have to go through hundreds of prior cases. The search engine we are planning to develop, will assist a lawyer and a common man as follows: A lawyer will be helped in finding relevant prior-cases that he/she may need to argue an ongoing case. On providing the basic keywords that describe the ongoing case, the system shall return relevant prior case documents along with some basic information related to the documents, that will help the lawyer in having a quick glimpse of relevant prior cases. A common man, who will type in a natural language query, will be helped by retrieving acts, sections of acts and relevant cases, which will potentially help the common man have a basic idea before seeking legal advice.