bharat-courts for Lawyers¶

bharat-courts gives the AI assistant you already use — Claude, and other tools — live and historical access to the official Indian court record. Instead of logging into clunky eCourts portals, solving CAPTCHAs by hand, and copy-pasting case details one row at a time, you simply ask in plain English: "What's the next hearing in my Bombay High Court writ petition?" or "Find me Supreme Court judgments on the right to privacy." The assistant reaches straight into the eCourts platform and the public judgment archive, does the tedious clicking for you, and hands back the answer.

It is free, open-source, and runs on your own machine. There is no new subscription, no third-party legal database to pay for, and your queries stay on your computer.

Who this section is for

These pages are written for practising lawyers and their teams — no coding required. If you build legal-tech and want the Python SDK and API signatures, head to the engineer guides and the API reference instead.

What it can do for you¶

Think of it as a research clerk that never sleeps and never loses a session to a CAPTCHA.

Track your matters and check case status¶

Look up any case by case number, party name, or advocate across 25+ High Courts, 700+ District Courts, and the Supreme Court. Pull up the parties, the CNR number, the case type, and the filing details in seconds.

"Find all matters for Reliance Industries in the Delhi High Court filed in 2024."

"Look up writ petition W.P.(C) 4520 of 2023 in the Bombay High Court."

An honest note on live status

The eCourts case-search endpoint the tool reads returns the parties, case number and CNR, but not a live "Pending / Disposed" flag or the next-hearing date — those sit behind a separate case-history page the library does not yet read. For the most reliable picture of where a matter stands today, treat the tool as your fast first look and confirm the live status detail on the portal.

See the daily cause lists¶

Find out which cases are listed before which bench, on any given day, without refreshing the portal all morning.

"Download the civil cause list for the Delhi High Court for tomorrow."

"What's listed before the District & Sessions Judge at Patna Sadar on 20 March?"

Pull order and judgment PDFs¶

Get the PDFs of orders and judgments in a matter with a single request — saved straight to a file you can read or forward.

"Download every order in this Calcutta High Court WPA from 2024."

"Get me the latest order PDF in this case and summarise it."

Search 75 years of judgments and precedent¶

Behind the live portals sits a historical archive of Supreme Court judgments from 1950 onwards and 25 High Courts — a public, openly-licensed dataset (CC-BY-4.0) hosted on AWS Open Data. It carries no CAPTCHA and no rate limits, so precedent research is fast.

"Find judgments authored by Justice Chandrachud in the Supreme Court between 2018 and 2024."

"Show me all Delhi High Court judgments from 2020 mentioning Tata."

One question, the right source

You never have to decide whether your question needs the live portal or the historical archive. The library's find routing picks the right backend for you — a CNR or a precedent search goes to the fast archive; a free-text body search goes to the live portal — and tells you which source each result came from.

Why it's different¶

Free and open-source

bharat-courts is released under the MIT licence. There is no per-seat fee, no usage cap, and no expensive commercial database in the middle. You pay nothing to use it.

Runs locally — your work stays confidential

The tool runs on your own computer. Your searches — client names, case numbers, the matters you are researching — are sent only to the official court systems they query, not to any bharat-courts server. There isn't one.

Straight from the official source

Results come directly from the eCourts platform (hcservices.ecourts.gov.in, services.ecourts.gov.in, judgments.ecourts.gov.in), the Supreme Court's own site, the Calcutta High Court website, and the government-affiliated AWS Open Data judgment archive. You are reading the court record, not a re-keyed third-party copy.

Where it is honest about its limits

The historical archive lags real time by roughly 2–3 months (it refreshes bi-monthly for the Supreme Court and quarterly for the High Courts), so a judgment delivered last week may only be reachable via the live portal. Automated CAPTCHA solving is good but not perfect, so the occasional live lookup needs a retry — the library handles those retries for you. When something is unavailable or stale, the assistant should say so rather than guess.

Get set up in minutes¶

Pick the assistant you already use. Each guide walks you through installation and your first query in plain English.

Use it in Claude Desktop

The simplest path for most lawyers. Install the app, add the bharat-courts skill, and ask away — no terminal required for day-to-day use.
Use it in Claude Code

For the command line. Run bharat-courts install-skills once and Claude Code can look up cases and judgments for you in any project.
ChatGPT and other assistants

Not on Claude? You can still use bharat-courts as a tool the honest way — through its Python command-line interface. Here's how.
Example prompts to copy

A ready-to-use library of plain-English prompts for case status, cause lists, order PDFs, and precedent research — grouped by what you need.

Next step¶

Most lawyers should start with Claude Desktop — it's the gentlest setup. Once it's connected, open the example prompts and try one against a matter you're working on today. If you hit a snag or want to know more about accuracy, cost, and privacy, the FAQ answers the questions lawyers ask most.