What You Can Ask¶
This is your prompt playbook. Once bharat-courts is installed into your AI assistant (see Claude Desktop or Claude Code), you can ask for Indian court data in plain English — no case-citation format to memorise, no portal to navigate, no CAPTCHAs to squint at.
Below are the everyday tasks lawyers do most, each with example prompts you can copy, adapt, and type straight into the chat. A short note under each group tells you what comes back.
How to read this page
The prompts are written the way a real person would type them. You do not need exact case numbers or codes — the assistant figures out the right court and the right lookup from what you describe. The more specific you are (court, year, party name), the faster and tighter the answer.
1. Case status and next hearing¶
Find a matter and see where it stands — across the High Courts and the 700+ District Courts on the eCourts platform. You can search by party name, by case number, or by CNR (the 16-character Case Number Record that uniquely identifies every case).
What's the CNR and the parties for case number 100 of 2024 in the Patna district court, Patna Sadar?
What comes back: the matched cases with case number, case type (e.g. "W.P.(C)"), the petitioner and respondent, the court name, and the CNR. You can then ask follow-ups like "now get me the orders in that one" (see section 3).
A note on live status fields
The eCourts case-lookup returns the parties, case number, and CNR reliably. Fields like the current Pending/Disposed status, the next hearing date, and the judges are not part of that quick lookup — they sit behind a separate case-history page the tool does not read yet. For the authoritative current status of a live matter, treat the result as a starting point and confirm on the official portal or the case file.
For the engineering detail behind these lookups, see the High Courts guide and the District Courts guide.
2. The daily cause list¶
See which cases are listed before which bench, for today or any date you name — for both High Courts and District Courts.
What comes back: for High Courts, the list of benches sitting that day with a downloadable cause-list PDF per bench. For District Courts, structured entries — serial number, case number, parties, advocates, and the court number — for the date and court you asked about.
Dates
If you don't name a date, you get today's list. Dates are interpreted as DD-MM-YYYY internally, but you can just say "tomorrow" or "15 January 2025" and the assistant will translate.
3. Orders and judgments in a specific case¶
List every order passed in a case — and download the PDFs.
Find the orders in WPA 12886 of 2024 in the Calcutta High Court (appellate side) and save the judgments.
What comes back: each order with its date, type ("Order", "Interim Order", "Judgment"), the judge, and a link to the PDF — which the assistant can download and save to a file for you.
Calcutta High Court has its own door
For Calcutta HC matters from September 2020 onwards, the tool can search the court's own website directly, which often has better PDF coverage and includes the neutral citation (e.g. 2024:CHC-AS:1277). Just mention Calcutta and the side (appellate, original, Jalpaiguri, or Port Blair). See the Calcutta HC guide.
Some PDFs are not uploaded
Even when a case exists, an individual order PDF may simply not have been uploaded to eCourts yet. The tool will give you the case and the order list; if a specific PDF isn't available, that's a gap on the portal, not an error on your end.
4. Precedent and research across the historical archive¶
This is where bharat-courts shines for research. It can query a complete historical archive of judgments — the Supreme Court from 1950 to the present, plus 25 High Courts — with no CAPTCHA and no rate limits. Search by judge, by year or year range, by citation, or by keyword in the title.
What comes back: the matched judgments with decision date, case ID, title, citation, and disposal outcome — and the assistant can fetch the full PDF for any of them. Supreme Court judgments are also available in regional languages (Hindi, Tamil, Gujarat, and more); High Court archive PDFs are English-only.
Keyword search: title vs. full text
The historical archive matches keywords against the case title and metadata, not the full body of the judgment. For a true full-text search across the body of High Court judgments — "every case that mentions 'right to privacy' anywhere in the text" — the tool uses the live eCourts judgment-search portal instead. You can simply ask in plain English; the assistant picks the right source for you.
See the Archive guide and the Judgment Search guide for the full picture.
5. Recent Supreme Court judgments feed¶
Stay on top of what the Supreme Court has just delivered.
What comes back: the most recent items from the Supreme Court's official "Latest Judgements / Orders" feed (up to 50) — each with the parties, case number, diary number, decision date, and a downloadable PDF. No CAPTCHA needed for this one.
Searching the Supreme Court by case or party
The recent-judgments feed is the supported way to pull fresh SCI items. Searching the Supreme Court by a specific case number or party name through the live portal is not wired up yet — for older SCI matters, use the historical archive (section 4), which goes back to 1950.
See the Supreme Court guide.
6. Bulk and research-scale pulls¶
For power users — chambers running large research projects, legal-tech teams, or anyone building a dataset — the tool can stream judgments at scale.
What comes back: results streamed in batches rather than all at once, so even tens-of-thousands-of-row pulls stay manageable. Every result can be exported to JSON for a spreadsheet, dashboard, or case-management tool.
This is genuinely fast
Because the archive is read directly from public data buckets, bulk pulls run in seconds with no portal load and no CAPTCHA — unlike the live portals, which are rate-limited and CAPTCHA-gated. If you're doing research at scale, ask for the archive. Engineers can see the streaming API in the Archive guide.
Two honest limitations worth knowing¶
These aren't problems with the tool so much as facts about the underlying data. Keeping them in mind will save you a surprise.
1. Freshness — the archive lags a couple of months
The historical archive is refreshed periodically (Supreme Court roughly every two months, High Courts roughly quarterly), so a judgment delivered in the last 2–3 months may not be in it yet. When you ask about a very recent matter, the assistant will reach for the live portals instead. If a recent search comes back empty, just say "check the live portal too" — that's the right next move.
2. Always verify anything mission-critical
bharat-courts fetches data from the official eCourts and Supreme Court sources — it doesn't make anything up. But AI output is a powerful research aid, not legal advice. For anything that decides a filing, a limitation date, or a client's position, confirm the result against the official record or the case file before you rely on it.
Where to go next¶
- New to all this? Start with Using bharat-courts in Claude.
- Questions about cost, privacy, and accuracy? See the FAQ.
- An engineer on your team wants the API? Point them at the guides.