Source: The Business Times

AI is being positioned as a tool to reduce repetitive, process-driven legal work in Asian courts, with founders and lawyers saying the bigger opportunity lies in automating mundane administrative tasks rather than replacing lawyers outright. The piece highlights concerns about generative AI producing fake citations and hallucinations, and quotes Sonam Chandwani and Denise Farmer on the need to relieve clerical burdens while noting the profession’s worry about reduced junior hiring. It describes how incumbents such as Clio have repositioned as AI-first platforms and mentions Anthropic’s legal plugins and industry funding dynamics that have intensified competition.

Multiple Asian startups are developing localized courtroom technologies: live transcription tailored to dialects and legal jargon, paperless case-filing and case-management dashboards, and legal research systems trained on regional laws. Adalat AI claims in-house models supporting 15 Indian languages, statewide use in Kerala and deployment across thousands of courtrooms in ten Indian states, plus interest from Indonesia; the firm also says it stores judicial data on servers within India. Another startup, Nyai, aims to produce research outputs with paragraph-level citations and to return an explicit “insufficient data” response rather than hallucinate. The article notes regulatory attention — including a cited warning from India’s Supreme Court against relying on AI citations — and observes that AI policy and clear regulatory frameworks remain incomplete in several Asian jurisdictions.