New Delhi, Feb 20 (PTI) Outsourcing all work to artificial intelligence (AI) will decay the human mind, Supreme Court advocate and IT expert Pavan Duggal said while underscoring the emerging importance and the potential of the new technology to transform India’s legal ecosystem in unprecedented ways.
India is hosting the world’s largest artificial intelligence conclave, the AI Impact Summit-2026, to make a big pitch for the new technology. The five-day summit from February 16 has seen packed halls and long queues, as tech moguls, industry leaders, policymakers, founders, and technologists thronged the Bharat Mandapam here.
In an exclusive interview with PTI, Duggal said AI is poised to transform the country’s legal ecosystem which has largely remained unchanged for centuries.
However, he has a word of caution for the citizens, especially those associated with the legal and judicial system, saying the absence of a dedicated legal framework could create serious risks.
Cautioning further, he said blind reliance on AI outputs leads to a situation where many users started treating them as ‘gospel truths’.
“The moment you are going ahead and outsourcing all your work to AI, you are really trying to decay your own mind. This particular extensive over-reliance on AI could have a negative impact and will prejudicially impact their cognitive thought processes and thinking capabilities,” the senior lawyer said.
Responding to the top court’s recent views over the trend of lawyers relying on AI tools to draft petitions and mentioning non-existent judgments and fabricated quotations before the court, he said that indiscriminate use of such technology was not a healthy trend for the profession.
He said that AI must remain a tool subject to human verification and due diligence.
Duggal said AI is a “transformational force” impacting almost every area of human activity, including the legal ecosystem, which he described as historically resistant to change.
“I believe AI is going to bring a wind of change in this sector that we have never seen before. Normally, it is said that the legal profession is the one that changes the least, and it has changed the least in the last 300 years. However, with the coming of artificial intelligence, it’s going to be changing the most,” he said.
He said that AI at present is largely being used as a support tool in India’s legal market, but it will soon evolve into a decision-making tool.
“Currently, AI is more of a support tool that I can see in the Indian market, but very quickly it’s going to become a very important decision-making tool,” he said.
Duggal said that the present laws in India, like the Information Technology Act 2000 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, do not address or remain silent on the threats posed by artificial intelligence.
“India does not have any dedicated law on artificial intelligence. India also does not have any law on cybersecurity. India also doesn’t have a dedicated law on cybercrime,” he said.
He underlined that AI could play a significant role in easing the burden of courts and reducing the mounting pendency of cases across the country.
“I am of the firm opinion that AI can definitely help substantially in reducing the areas of pendency in Indian courts,” he said.
Duggal suggested that traffic challans and small claims up to Rs 10 lakh could be adjudicated through AI systems, subject to appeal before a human judge.
He also proposed using AI to club cases involving similar questions of law and to assist courts with research drawn from authenticated judgment databases.
“If AI can help us with club matters where similar principles of law are involved, and if that principle of law gets decided by the courts, then automatically, the set principle of law would lead to judgments and the final conclusion of a large number of these bunched cases,” he said.
On being asked if AI could impact the legal professions, Duggal acknowledged that AI would adversely impact paralegals and junior lawyers, with some law firms already retrenching staff due to automation.
“I think AI will very prejudicially impact the paralegal sector. In fact, the paralegal sector is going to pretty much get extinct after a couple of years,” he said, adding that while some jobs may be lost, new opportunities would emerge for AI-skilled legal professionals.
On the use of AI tools, he said lawyers are increasingly using platforms such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and other paid AI legal services, but reiterated that outputs must be independently verified.
“Please don’t take the output of AI as gospel truth. Why? Because it has to be independently verified, checked,” he said.
Duggal noted that AI is being used by several judges for drafting judgments and said that the central issue now is determining liability when AI causes harm, which can be addressed by a graded liability framework involving coders, AI companies and users.
“Once AI causes harm to another person who can be made accountable or liable for the same,” he said.
He added that the law must clearly define rights, duties and responsibilities of AI service providers before its integration in the legal atmosphere.
“I believe AI education, along with cyber law education, will have to be incorporated as part of the school curriculum from the first standard onwards,” he said. PTI SKM SJK ZMN
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