By Mina Jenkins
India is emerging as a significant force in legal technology. Multiple data sources suggest the country is home to around 1,000 homegrown startups in the sector – second only to the United States. At RSGI’s RISE Legal India half-day conference in February, delegates examined how law firms and general counsel can navigate an era of disruptive trade policy, technological change and geopolitical uncertainty. AI and digital transformation ranked as clear priorities – yet, as in other legal markets, Indian law firms are wrestling with which tools to adopt as well as needing to make progress with their core infrastructure.
Homegrown or global tools?
One of the more interesting tensions in the Indian legal market is the pull between domestic platforms and global heavyweights. India has its own legal AI players — most notably Lucio and Jurisphere — which have found traction across firms of varying sizes and budgets. Notably, this is not simply a story of smaller firms choosing homegrown tools for cost reasons: Trilegal, rated by RSGI as one of India’s top five firms, was a development partner for Lucio.
Global platforms are nonetheless making serious inroads. Harvey is in use at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas, AZB & Partners and S&A Law Offices, among others, while Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas has adopted Legora.
A willingness to purchase AI licences notably does not always translate into confidence about deployment: at RISE Legal India, during a managing partners roundtable attended by representatives of 15 leading firms, senior partners expressed deep concern about reputational exposure from AI errors – a concern that is only too familiar to legal market observers elsewhere.
The information architecture problem
Recent research from iManage, drawing on a survey of more than 3,200 decision-makers in professional services firms globally, includes a dedicated segment on the Indian legal market. It’s interesting to note that Indian practitioners rank among the most optimistic about AI’s potential: bullish on profitability and enthusiastic about what lies ahead. And yet the average Indian legal professional still loses between 37 and 40 minutes every day simply trying to find information. As iManage puts it, this is “the hidden search tax” — and critically, it is not an AI problem. It is an information architecture problem.
What comes next
The Indian legal market clearly has an appetite for change. The openness to legal technology feels genuine rather than performative. A digital-native AI law firm has not yet emerged – though the general counsel of Premji Invest issued precisely that challenge to the room – but given the momentum, it seems a question of when rather than if.
