Justice at your Fingertips: How Technology is Revolutionizing legal aid access

Team SCLHR
Jul 16, 2023
5 min read

by Ayush Agarwal and Amitabh Saxena

Introduction

‘As technology evolves and becomes more accessible, it can transform the delivery of legal aid and bridge the justice gap for millions of people in India.’ India’s access to justice issues is particularly challenging due to the country’s high poverty rate and a lack of lawyers per capita, distributed unevenly across the country. Overcoming these obstacles will require the implementation of creative and unusual solutions.

Legal Aid has traditionally been seen as a basic right in the pursuit of justice. Traditional legal aid procedures, on the other hand, have frequently been expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to manage, leaving many individuals without the essential resources to seek justice. In recent years, technology has emerged as an effective tool for removing barriers to legal aid access. Technology is revolutionising the way legal aid is offered and making it more accessible than ever before, from online legal materials to virtual consultations.

The Indian Constitution guarantees free legal aid to all citizens in Article 39A of the Indian Constitution. However, despite this constitutional promise, many individuals are unable to access the legal services they require. In this blog, we will look at how technology is being used to increase legal aid access, as well as the problems and benefits it offers.

Modern problems require modern solutions –

Legal Aid and Law Colleges–

When we look at the current situation, practically all leading law schools provide legal assistance clinics, but we don’t know how many students participated in those clinical activities. There are almost 800 approved law colleges in India, and the BCI mandates each to conduct at least one legal aid clinic. The main reason for this lack is the hectic academic curriculum of law school, but this can be changed by using technology where both legal aid and curriculum can be managed by introducing incentivizing legal aid Credit system, students who participate in these clinical should be given credit and can be managed by the portal of new education policy named Academic bank of the credit system.

Increasing accessibility of legal services –

Technology is not only revolutionising the practising of law throughout the world, but it is also providing opportunities for breakthroughs in improving access to justice. Traditionally there have been legal awareness camps but contemporary needs require that these camps should also be held in schools and colleges. These camps, should be interactive in nature, incorporating real real-life studies or innovative methods of disbursing information. Feedback should be taken from the participants after each session and should be incorporated when organising further sessions. School children or college students could be involved as volunteers in organising awareness campaigns in their neighboring areas and a certificate of appreciation could be awarded to them for being part of the legal aid mass awareness campaign.

Role of Artificial Intelligence and steps by the Indian Government to Popularise Legal Aid- The Indian government has sought to integrate it to facilitate courts and to provide legal aid. Indian Government has come up with schemes that are based on the usage of AI technology to provide people with free legal assistance.

SAMA– Sama is an online dispute resolution platform. It uses alternate dispute resolution methods (arbitration, mediation, and conciliation) for resolving all categories of disputes through its panel of dispute resolution professionals called “neutrals”. Sama facilitates online Lok Adalat by providing technical support and expertise to State Legal Services Authorities (‘SLSAs’) to conduct these proceedings virtually. Currently, this service is being offered by Sama in a pro-bono manner only.
The Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy’sNyaaya initiative created a resource that allows users to choose a topic and then self-navigate through the information sub-topics. Vidhi centre can work like Chatbots that can be used to give basic legal information and advice. Chatbots can assist people in navigating legal challenges, understanding their rights, and connecting them with legal aid providers.
Common Service Centres- We believe that video-based legal assistance, similar to the model established by the Legal Advice Centre, should be implemented. As NALSA announced in 2017 an effort to deploy 1000 trained volunteers to assist village inhabitants in receiving legal assistance from advocates headquartered in bigger centers linked to State Legal Services Agencies using video conferencing technology.
Tele-Law was launched to make legal aid more accessible through an experienced panel of advocates working with SLSAs. The concept is to link attorneys and clients via video conferencing at Common Service Centres (CSC) staffed by paralegal volunteers.

Substantive Analysis

Access to expeditious and inexpensive justice is a basic human right and part of Article 21 of the constitution of India. It is essential to emphasize Chandra Bhawan Boarding and Lodging Bangalore v State of Mysorein which a constitutional Bench of SC held that “While rights conferred under Part III are fundamental, the directives given under part IV are fundamental in the governance of the country. There is no conflict on the whole between the provisions contained in Part III and Part IV. They are complementary and supplementary to each other.”

Constitutional protection given under Article 39A of Part IV has not been fully realized. The government has recognized the structural and institutional barriers that impede access to legal services and is taking steps to address them through technological solutions. To this end, it has introduced several programs aimed at facilitating the digitization of the legal system.

Efforts to increase access to justice, public involvement, and communications, which may be “leveraged” by introducing these technologies, have often not been directed at appropriate levels of decision makers. Too many projects are handled at low levels with functional power and clout rather than decision-making authority. This has resulted in budget cuts and projects being cancelled at times. Management turnover, as well as communication issues across cultures and languages, have slowed the speed and success of many initiatives.

Without a doubt, new technologies provide the potential for judicial policymakers to make justice more accessible, transparent, and effective. What has to be decided is how to best execute the technological transformation. Legal systems must be more accessible and approachable as public knowledge and culture demand. Most technological improvements have been focused on upgrading courts, but before this, there is a need to use technology to provide legal assistance because if they do not know their rights and remedies, they will not go to court to claim them, and all infrastructure expenditures would be in vain.

Around 93% of India’s workforce is constituted of informal and migrant workers. This staggering population is overworked and underpaid, susceptible to exploitation and abuse, and often denied rights and entitlements. Some people have never heard of free legal services organisations and then use Google to solve their legal problems. Many of these searches will come across inaccurate or misleading material from online sources.

To solve such issues there are websites such as Justice Adda, that make available resources using law and design thinking to improve legal awareness in the community. The main limitation that Justice Adda and similar digitisation programmes face are that they are not in vernacular languages. There are still many obstacles to overcome before individuals may receive free legal help using information and communication technologies.

Conclusion

Making court procedures and functioning public, regardless of how tiny the proportion, is another attempt to instill trust in the population while also establishing a parallel bridge to digital connection and the establishment of an overall sophisticated functional judicial system. The implementation process has been delayed and staggered, with perception issues among various user groups. If we introduce a new app or website, the quality, efficacy, or appropriateness of such legal advice should be measured or independently checked. Until the government acknowledges these issues and regards legal aid delivery as more than a technological solution, the goal of providing sufficient legal services to all Indians will remain unmet. Notwithstanding the advances achieved by the legal aid community in leveraging the power of technology, the road ahead still presents several hurdles.

Chandra Bhawan Boarding and Lodging, Bangalore v State of Mysore, (1970) AIR 2042 para 13, 2050