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Set up bharat-courts in Claude Code

If you work in Claude Code (or Claude CoWork), this is the most reliable way to give Claude access to Indian court data. It takes one command. After that, you simply ask for what you need in plain English — Claude figures out which court, which portal, and how to fetch the answer.

This page walks you through it end to end. No prior coding knowledge is assumed.

What you're setting up

bharat-courts ships an Agent Skill — a small bundle of instructions that teaches Claude how to use the library. The bharat-courts install-skills command copies that bundle into a folder Claude Code already watches (.claude/skills/). Claude discovers it automatically; there is nothing else to switch on.

Step 1 — Install bharat-courts

You need Python 3.11 or newer. In a terminal, install the package with the two extras that make it most capable for legal work:

pip install "bharat-courts[ocr,archive]"
  • ocr adds automatic CAPTCHA solving, so Claude can read the live eCourts portals (case status, orders, cause lists) without you typing in those squiggly codes by hand.
  • archive adds the historical research archive — Supreme Court judgments back to 1950 and 25 High Courts, with no CAPTCHA and no rate limits.

Why both extras

With both installed, Claude can answer current-status questions and historical-research questions, and it picks the right source for each query on its own. If you only ever need one side, you can install just [ocr] or just [archive] — the skill works with whatever is available.

For more on the install options (including the [all] bundle and the ONNX CAPTCHA solver), see the Installation guide.

Step 2 — Install the skill into your project

Move into the folder where you do your work — your matter folder, a research directory, anywhere you'll be chatting with Claude Code — and run:

bharat-courts install-skills

You'll see exactly this confirmation:

Skills installed to `.claude/skills/bharat-courts`.

That's it. The command copied the skill bundle into a hidden .claude/skills/ folder inside your current directory.

What just happened

install-skills writes the skill files into .claude/skills/bharat-courts/ relative to wherever you ran the command. Run it once per project folder where you want court-data access. If you work across several matter folders, run it in each one (or run it at the top level of a workspace that contains them).

Step 3 — Just ask

Claude Code automatically discovers any skill placed under .claude/skills/. Open Claude Code in that folder and ask for what you need in everyday language. For example:

Find all pending writ petitions for Tata Motors in the Delhi High Court from 2024.

Pull every Supreme Court judgment authored by Justice Chandrachud between 2018 and 2024 and list the case numbers.

What's on the cause list for the Karnataka High Court tomorrow?

Download the latest orders in WPA 12886 of 2024 before the Calcutta High Court.

Show me the most recent Supreme Court judgments and save the PDFs.

Claude reads the skill, decides whether the answer lives in the live portals or the historical archive, handles the CAPTCHA and session details, and returns the result. You stay in plain English the whole way.

For a much larger, copy-paste-ready set of example prompts grouped by task, see Example prompts for lawyers.

Accuracy and freshness

The historical archive lags live court records by about two to three months. If you ask about something decided very recently and Claude comes back empty from the archive, ask it to "check the live portal instead" — the skill knows to fall back, and Claude will tell you when it does.

Claude CoWork

Claude CoWork uses the same skill bundle. There is no separate package and no different file — it is the identical .claude/skills/bharat-courts/ bundle that install-skills produces.

The only difference is how CoWork picks the bundle up. Add it the way CoWork loads Agent Skills, then ask in natural language exactly as you would in Claude Code. The precise menus and steps for adding a skill are owned by Anthropic and can change, so rather than guess at labels here, follow the official guide:

Once CoWork sees the skill, every example prompt on this page works unchanged.

It's the same mechanism everywhere

Claude Code, Claude CoWork, and other Claude surfaces that support Agent Skills all consume the one bundle produced by bharat-courts install-skills. Install once, use anywhere Claude reads skills.

For engineers: skip the skill if you prefer

You can call the library directly

The Agent Skill is a convenience layer over a normal Python SDK and CLI. If you're building tooling or scripting bulk work, you don't need Claude in the loop at all — call the SDK or the bharat-courts command yourself.

  • The CLI guide covers commands like bharat-courts find, bharat-courts hcservices search, and bharat-courts archive query.
  • The federated facade guide covers the Judgments().find(...) entry point that routes between the live portals and the archive for you.

Troubleshooting

The confirmation line didn't appear

If you see Skill source directory not found. instead, the install of the package itself didn't complete. Re-run Step 1, then bharat-courts install-skills again.

Claude isn't using the skill

Make sure you ran install-skills inside the folder you have open in Claude Code, and that a .claude/skills/bharat-courts/ folder now exists there. Skills are discovered per project directory.

CAPTCHA or live-portal questions fail

Confirm you installed the ocr extra (Step 1). Without it, the live eCourts portals can't be read automatically. The historical archive still works without ocr.

Where to next