Reforming the Indian Bar: The limits of technological solutions

Abstract

A majority of Indians do not have effective access to legal services, despite the constitutional promise of access to justice. There are two intertwined reasons for this: the unavailability of a sufficient number of good quality lawyers, and the high costs of accessing legal services. The Indian legal profession is highly unequal, with ‘prestige’ being the currency of upward professional mobility. The professional regulator, the Bar Council of India, simply lacks the capacity to regulate quality. As a consequence, clients lack the information to access lawyers, and to understand the outcomes they desire from them, and the fees they have to pay. Legal aid solutions are only able to cater to a fraction of these unmet legal needs. In this paper, we observe that in the absence of regulatory reform, the Indian state and private players are attempting to use technology to address this capacity problem. The Supreme Court’s e-Courts project promised to transform the system through information technology enablement of courts, while the private legal tech sector has designed several solutions, including lawyer matching platforms for delivery of legal services. However, the success of the e-courts project remains mixed at best, with the litigant remaining underserved, and private sector solutions have failed to reach scale due to regulatory uncertainty and their inability to build trust. The paper argues that technological solutions as currently designed are useful in fixing process-specific issues, but are inadequate to address the more fundamental problem of misaligned incentives and deep-rooted regulatory design flaws of the Indian legal profession, which require much broader scale reform.