Gurugram: The Punjab and Haryana High Court criticised advocates last week for relying on their mobile phones to access information through artificial intelligence (AI) tools and Google Search during court arguments. The court called the habit “unprofessional” and said that it disrupts proceedings.
Hearing a case on 30 September, Justice Sanjay Vashisth took exception to counsel Sandeep Verma for turning to his phone in the middle of a hearing, searching for information he needed to reply to a court query, instead of arriving at court prepared.
“This court is concerned and bothered, time and again, by the respected members of the Bar using mobile phones during the course of hearings, just in front of the court,” Justice Vashisth said, adding that sometimes, judges have to stall proceedings and wait for the answer, which comes only after the retrieval of information from mobile phones.
Justice Vashisth expressed his frustration over the recurring issue, which, he said, led to delays in hearings. He cited a separate 19 September case—Ravneet Singh Sandhu @ Manveer Singh vs UT of Chandigarh—where authorities seized a phone from advocate Jashan Mehta as he took it out during his court submissions to retrieve the details of an FIR naming his client, but without any direct links to the petition the court had been hearing.
The judge called for the latest order to be shared with the Bar Association’s leadership.
“The President/Secretary of the Bar Association may apprise the worthy members not to compel the court to pass any harsh order on account of repeated use of mobile phones during the course of hearing to update themselves through artificial intelligence/online platforms/Google information,” Justice Vashisth said in his order.
Divided legal community
Legal observers, however, are divided on the issue. Some see these rulings as part of a broader push for courtroom etiquette in the digital era, where quick access to information risks eroding thorough preparations, while others maintain that smartphones and AI are already part of the judicial process.
Amit Rana, the vice-chairperson of the court’s Bar Council, told ThePrint that the use of AI apps, such as ChatGPT, has become rampant among lawyers, especially among younger lawyers. While senior lawyers still rely on books and knowledge for pleadings and arguments, some young lawyers are using ChatGPT and other AI tools extensively to draft their arguments.
“When you have prepared your case well, you always argue with confidence before the court. But when you have relied on quick fix solutions by use of AI, you need to refer to papers or sometimes on the phone, the moment the court asks a question,” said Rana.
Rana added that the use of AI was fraught with the risks of errors, unless it was cross-checked with legal texts.
He referred to a 25 September Delhi High Court case, in which a lawyer was allowed to withdraw the case after he quoted non-existent Supreme Court citations in support of the petition filed. The petition—a Civil Miscellaneous Appeal accessed by The Print—was filed by the Greenopolis Welfare Association (GWA) before a single-judge bench of Justice Girish Kathpalia. The GWA was challenging a trial court’s order that restricted it from filing its written statement, but allowed pleas by various homebuyers.
While allowing the petitioner to withdraw the appeal, the court noted in its order, “Learned senior counsel for petitioner, on instructions, seeks permission to withdraw this petition. All learned senior counsel and counsel appearing for respondents submit that they would take appropriate steps since some of the judicial precedents cited on behalf of petitioner do not even exist, and in some of the precedents, the quoted portions do not exist.”
Rana revealed that the AI-generated petition cited non-existent case laws and contained errors in its citations from other judgments.
P.K. Sandhir, a criminal lawyer practising in the Punjab and Haryana High Court, however, differed with Rana.
“A smartphone is nothing but a small laptop or a tablet. We send emails from our smartphones and send WhatsApp messages and do Google searches. We are living in times when summons sent on WhatsApp are being considered legal. Even WhatsApp chat and conversation is admissible as evidence in the courts under the BNSS,” Sandhir told ThePrint. “Under such circumstances, prohibiting the use of mobile [phones] completely until it’s causing hindrance in the functioning of the court is a little unreasonable.”
He, however, added that talking on the phone in the court when the judge is sitting is not only discourteous but also amounts to disruption of the court proceedings. Sandhir said that, so far as the use of AI is concerned, even the Supreme Court has been using it, but the only question is whether the advocates use it intelligently or indiscreetly.
On 25 July this year, the Minister of State (Independent Charge) and the Ministry of Law and Justice and Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs Arjun Ram Meghwal informed the Lok Sabha in a written reply that, according to information provided by the Supreme Court of India, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning-based (ML) tools are being deployed in case management.
“These tools are being used in transcribing oral arguments in Constitutional Bench matters. The AI-assisted transcribed arguments can be accessed from the website of the Supreme Court,” the minister informed the Lok Sabha.
He said that the Supreme Court of India was also using AI and ML based tools in close coordination with National Informatics Centre (NIC), in translation of judgments from English language to 18 Indian languages – Assamese, Bengali, Garo, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khasi, Konkani, Malayali, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Santali, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
The judgments can be accessed through the eSCR portal of the Supreme Court of India.
It said that the Supreme Court of India, in close coordination with IIT Madras, has developed and deployed AI and ML-based tools, integrated with the electronic filing software for the identification of defects. Recently, access to the prototype has been granted to 200 advocates-on-record.
The minister’s reply added that the AI-based tool—Supreme Court Portal Assistance in Court Efficiency (SUPACE)—“aimed at developing a module to understand the factual matrix of cases with an intelligent search of the precedents apart from identifying the cases, is in an experimental stage of development”.
“SUPACE may be deployed after procurement and deployment of graphic processing unit(s) and other latest technology-based units, such as Tensor Processing Unit [TPU],” it said.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)