How to Evaluate Litigation Tracking Software in India: A Buyer's Checklist

The problem with most legal software demos

A demo is a performance. The vendor picks the case, the court and the search term. Everything loads. Everything is current. Then you sign, upload your real matters, and discover that the tribunal where a third of your disputes sit is not covered, or that orders show up four days late, or that your counsel's spelling of a party name returns nothing.

The fix is boring and it works: turn the demo into a test you control. Write the questions down first. Ask for answers in writing. Score every vendor on the same sheet. The checklist below is built for Indian forums specifically, because coverage and freshness in India depend on which registry publishes what, and how often.

If you are still working out what this category even is, start with #, then come back here.

Step 1: Write down the forums you actually appear in, then ask for a written coverage list

Before you look at a single product, pull your last 24 months of matters and list every forum by name. Not "tribunals". Name them.

A typical Indian corporate list runs wider than people expect:

• Supreme Court of India (sci.gov.in)
• Any of the 25 High Courts
• District and taluka courts, published through eCourts Services
• NCLT and NCLAT (nclt.gov.in)
• Debt Recovery Tribunals and DRAT
• ITAT, CESTAT, SAT, TDSAT, APTEL, AFT, CAT
• Consumer forums: district, state and NCDRC
• State RERA authorities
• Arbitration matters, which usually sit outside court data entirely

1. Count your matters per forum. Sort descending.
2. Send the top ten forums to each vendor and ask: "Do you cover this forum for case status, cause lists and orders? Yes or no, per forum."
3. Ask for a public coverage page you can link to, not a slide.
4. Mark any "on our roadmap" answer as not covered today.

A vendor that cannot produce a named list in writing is telling you something.

Step 2: Test data freshness per court, not in general

"Real time" is marketing. Court data in India is pulled from registry websites and published on registry schedules. The honest answer is a polling frequency, and it differs by court.

1. Ask: how often is each of my top ten forums polled?
2. Ask: at what time of day does the next working day's cause list appear in your product?
3. Ask: after an order is uploaded to the court site, what is your typical lag before it appears, and before my alert goes out?
4. Ask for the answer as a number of hours, and ask whether that number is contractual or best effort.
5. Verify it yourself during the trial. Pick three live matters. Note the order date and time on the court site. Note when the vendor's alert arrived. Record the gap.

Also ask what happens when a registry site is down for a day, which is common. Does the system flag a failed poll, or silently show stale data? Silent staleness is the expensive failure, because you stop checking.

Step 3: Check search behaviour on real, messy inputs

Indian cause lists are full of transliteration variants, abbreviations and typing errors. Test with inputs that look like your actual data, not clean ones.

Run the same five searches on every shortlisted product:

1. Your own company name, exactly as registered.
2. Your company name with a common variant: "Pvt Ltd" against "Private Limited", with and without full stops.
3. A deliberate misspelling of a party name, swapping one letter.
4. A CNR number. The CNR is the 16 character alphanumeric case identifier used across the eCourts system, so a tracking product should accept it directly and resolve to the right matter.
5. An advocate name, to see whether the product indexes counsel at all.

Score each search on whether the right matter appears, where it ranks, and how many irrelevant results you have to read past. Write the result down during the demo. Memory flatters whichever product you saw last.

Step 4: Ask where the data sits and what the DPDP posture is

Your matter list is personal data about identifiable people: employees, opposing parties, witnesses. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 applies to you as the data fiduciary, and your software vendor is usually a processor acting on your instructions.

Read the Act yourself on India Code, and check the current status of the rules on meity.gov.in before you sign anything.

Ask each vendor, in writing:

1. Where is the data hosted? Name the cloud provider and the region.
2. Section 8(2) of the Act requires a data fiduciary to engage a processor only under a valid contract. Will you sign a data processing agreement on those terms?
3. List every sub-processor, including analytics, email and alert delivery, error logging and any AI or LLM service.
4. If documents or matter text are sent to a third party model, is that opt-in, and is our content excluded from training?
5. Section 16 allows the Central Government to restrict transfers to notified countries. Where does processing happen, and what changes if a restriction is notified?
6. Retention: how long do you keep our data after termination, and how is deletion evidenced?
7. Breach handling: what is your notification timeline to us?

Ask for a public security page. A vendor that publishes hosting, sub-processors and retention on a page you can link to has made a commitment you can hold them to.

Step 5: Confirm export rights before you confirm anything else

Lock-in in this category is quiet. It happens when three years of hearing notes live inside a product with no bulk export.

1. Ask: can we export all matters, parties, hearing history, notes and uploaded documents?
2. In what format? CSV or XLSX for structured data, original file formats for documents, and a manifest linking documents to matters.
3. Self serve from the admin panel, or a support request? If support, what is the turnaround and is it chargeable?
4. Is export available after the subscription lapses, and for how long?
5. Is there an API, with public documentation, that lets us pull data on a schedule?

Run a real export during the trial. A promised export is not an export.

Step 6: Read the SLA and the support terms

Most legal software SLAs cover uptime of the dashboard. Almost none cover the thing that matters, which is the alert that tells you a hearing moved.

1. What is the uptime commitment, and what is the credit if it is missed?
2. Is there any commitment on alert delivery, or is it explicitly best effort? Get this in writing either way.
3. Support hours in IST, and channel: email, phone, WhatsApp, in-app.
4. First response target for a P1, such as alerts not firing at all.
5. Named escalation contact, with a second level.
6. Who fixes a wrong case mapping, and in how long?

Step 7: Compare pricing models, not headline numbers

Headline prices in this market are not comparable, because the unit differs. One vendor charges per user, another per matter tracked, another per API call, another bundles a case volume cap.

Normalise before you compare. Build one line per vendor:

That last row catches a common problem. Plan names and prices on a vendor website can drift from the same vendor's iOS or Android listing, because store listings are updated separately. Check both on the same day, screenshot both, and ask the vendor to confirm the current figure in writing with the tax treatment stated. Do this for every shortlisted vendor, including Claw.

Step 8: Ask for proof

1. Two named reference customers in your sector and of your size. Ask to speak to them without the vendor on the call.
2. Third party review profiles. G2, Capterra and app store listings all count. Note the number of reviews, not only the average. A 4.5 from six ratings is thin evidence, and you should treat it that way for every vendor.
3. A trial on your own case list, with your own matters loaded, running for at least two weeks so you see a full cause list cycle.
4. A written answer to every question above, signed off by someone with authority.

Worked example you can repeat

An in-house team has 140 live matters: 62 in district courts across four states, 31 in two High Courts, 24 at NCLT, 14 at DRT and 9 at NCDRC.

1. Coverage. They send those five forums to four vendors. Two confirm all five in writing. One covers DRT only for selected benches. One does not cover NCDRC.
2. Freshness. They pick six matters, two each at district court, NCLT and DRT. For ten working days they log when an order appears on the registry site and when the alert arrives. Vendor A averages 6 hours on district courts and 29 hours on DRT. Vendor B averages 14 hours across all three. They now have a number, not an adjective.
3. Search. They run the five searches from Step 3. Vendor A finds the misspelt party name, vendor B does not. Both accept the CNR.
4. DPDP. Both name their hosting region and will sign a DPA. Only one publishes a sub-processor list.
5. Export. They export everything in the trial. One produces CSV plus original PDFs with a manifest. One produces CSV only, documents on request.
6. Price. Normalised to 140 matters and 6 users, with GST stated, the gap between the two shortlisted vendors narrows to under 12 percent, which is less than the freshness difference is worth to them.

Decision made on recorded evidence, in about three weeks. If your matter volume looks like this example, # covers the operating side of it.

Printable scoring sheet

Score each criterion 0 to 5. Multiply by the weight. Highest total wins. Adjust weights to your own situation before the first demo, not after.

Maximum score with these weights is 90.

What you may be comparing

Buyers in India usually end up looking at a mix of research databases, free case search, and tracking or practice tools. Examples, in no particular order and with no ranking implied: Manupatra, Indian Kanoon, SCC Online, Legistify, CaseMine and LegitQuest. They are not all the same kind of product. A judgement research database answers a different question from a matter tracker, and buying one when you needed the other is the most common mistake in this category. For a side by side view, see #.

Where Claw fits

Claw (CLAW Legaltech, clawlaw.in) is a litigation search and tracking product used by lawyers, in-house legal teams and businesses in India who need to find court cases, track them, and check a company's litigation history. On this checklist, Claw is simply one of the vendors you should put through all eight steps. Ask us for the written coverage list, the per-court refresh answer, the hosting and sub-processor detail, the export test and a trial on your own case list, exactly as you would ask anyone else, and hold the answers against the scoring sheet above.

FAQs