The legal tech and data ecosystem in India has surely evolved in the last decade. It started with people following a few frugal data sharing practices mostly through physical hardware devices such as USB drives and CD-Roms, but we’ve come a long way where we access to legal data is almost a click away.

The sector saw a sharp rise in data availability and its usage, especially with the advent of the Ecourts MMP (Mission Mode Project) undertaken by the Government of India. The ever evolving internet ecosystem also helped the sector by introducing a few open and closed softwares that made us more efficient in dealing with these datasets.

India, has fewer concerns now with the availability of data but more with making that accessible and actionable for the ecosystem especially now when the emphasis towards empirical analysis of law is a common-place for learning, researching and designing studies not only for judicial reforms but also for policy making.

Fortunately, there is no dearth of data in the field of law and justice, but accessibility is still a major problem partially because of the multi-farious nature of these datasets. The court systems at all levels of the Judiciary are being updated and upgraded almost on an yearly basis in terms of technology, which creates problems for researchers to get bulk access to case-laws. There have been reports of inaccurate information (mostly becasue of the ever-evolving nature of NCRB data systems) from the Criminal Justice space, a similar story emerges from almost all other sectors within the law and justice evosystem as well.

Problems never seems to take a stall if you deal with the data systems of law and justice in our country, but we still have a lot of positive and inspirational examples from individuals and organisations who have managed to maintain these crucial datasets with the highest level of precision, mostly through their own ground work and community collaborations.

The Justice Hub is a home for all such initiatives.

The Justice Hub project was initiated as part of the Agami Challenge with a vision to make justice data more open, accessible and actionable. The hub is currently developed and maintained by the people at Agami and CivicDataLab

A saying by James Carse aptly summarizes our efforts and attempt to build this platform for and with the community:

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, is in learning to start something we can’t finish.

Building this platform is one of our short-term outputs but a longer-term plan is to work towards building a culture that enables the community to bootstrap more such open and collaborative initiatives.

Let the co-creation begin!

• To host high quality datasets, curated and contributed by the community.
• To work with users of data and create processes and tools to enable better interoperability between datasets.
• To create a living directory of researchers, CSO’s, legal tech firms and individuals who deal with datasets of law and justice.
• To build tools and resources that enable better collaboration within the community.
• To conduct trainings and knowledge sharing sessions with a diverse set of stakeholders to promote responsible data managament and sharing practices.
• To document the problems faced by the community when dealing with the data systems of law and justice and bring stakeholders together and identify probable solutions.
• To work towards bridging a wide gap between data creators and data consumers.