Free software for apex court decisions

ALLAHABAD: At a time when the policy makers are putting best of their effort for providing speedy and affordable justice to even the poorest men of the country, three friends—Girajapati Kaushal, Anuj Tiwari and Archit Dwivedi— have develop a software which gives easy and free accessibility to all judgments of Supreme Court (SC) since its inception (1950) free of cost.
By providing the software, which they have named Automated Research Tool (ART), free of cost to anyone including lakhs of lawyers across the country and the common man, the trio feels that the end benefit of this ‘free facility’ would help the common man of the country, who is often burdened with the high cost of getting justice in the country.

The idea of providing legal data of all SC judgments free of cost to the people through ART cropped in the minds of these three—Kaushal and Anuj being alumni of Chanakya National Law University Patna and Archit a software engineer—in the year 2013 when these two were still students of law.

“We had seen many instances wherein poor people had to sell their property and take loan to get justice and as student of law we realised that if we, as a lawyer, could get free and easy access to various judgments of apex court (which are relevant in a given case), we would could be in a position to charge less fee from the client and then we decided to work on something of ART type”, said Anuj while talking to TOI.

The software is loaded with several features like offline mode, easy and free accessibility, containing all judgments of SC, proximity, citation and wildcard search etc. “The software comes with sorting feature and can automatically generate projects and has a unique marking system besides being flawlessly intuitive and fast”, said Anuj.

Besides being free, as this can be downloaded by any user through www.freelegaldata.com to its system, the foremost feature of the software is its legal summarizer which is first off its kind and has the capability of summarizing Judgment of any court.

The Initiative has a two pronged strategy; the first leg involves providing cross-referenced and curate legal data pertaining to SC on an industry grade e-discovery platform. This aspect especially caters to Young Legal Professional and will make available a premium legal research platform to the legal professional at zero cost.

“We must strive for a truly just society, where the poor and rich are treated equally, thus, our humble contribution to achieving the dream of just society is to provide lawyers of the country free, open, and unrestricted access to our legal database”, said Kaushal, who has recently started his practice at Delhi.