Due to complicated legal jargon, unreliable documentation systems, and a general lack of knowledge of procedural requirements, ordinary persons in India still have very limited access to legal information. Because of this, people frequently rely extensively on legal experts for even the most basic comprehension, which creates substantial cost and informational hurdles. Large language models (LLMs) and other recent developments in artificial intelligence have made it possible to provide simple, scalable, and reasonably priced legal aid. This study provides a full AI-driven legal assistant specifically built for Indian law that supports statute-level information retrieval, natural-language querying, and legal document summarization. The system exhibits an effective balance between accuracy, speed, and accessibility. It is built with a React frontend, Node.js backend, MongoDB storage, and GPT-4o-mini.
We assess the system using ten real-world legal papers from the criminal, civil, procedural, and family law sectors, as well as fifty different legal queries. The assistant performed well in terms of clarity, summary quality, and user pleasure, with an average accuracy of 82%. The system architecture, data processing methodology, prompt engineering strategies, limitations, ethical considerations, and future improvements like multilingual support, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and domain-specific fine-tuning are all described in this paper in addition to the results. The results show that lightweight LLM-based solutions have a great deal of promise to empower individuals, students, and professionals looking for easily available legal clarity and to democratize legal knowledge.
Introduction
India’s legal system is vast and complex, making legal understanding difficult for most citizens due to complicated language, fragmented information, high consultation costs, and limited legal education. Although digital legal databases exist, they rely on keyword searches and legal expertise, while most AI-based legal tools are designed for Western jurisdictions and do not adapt well to Indian laws. This creates a strong need for an accessible, India-specific legal assistant.
The paper introduces a lightweight Legal AI Assistant designed to help non-lawyers with law lookup, document summarization, and natural-language legal guidance. Rather than focusing on judgment prediction or deep legal reasoning, the system emphasizes usability, affordability, and practical legal support through efficient workflows and large language model prompting.
The literature review shows that advances in NLP and transformer-based models have improved legal document processing, semantic search, and contract analysis. However, gaps remain in Indian legal tools, including limited AI-driven summarization, overreliance on keyword search, lack of Indian datasets, high costs, and the absence of an integrated platform for document upload, analysis, and case retrieval.
Related work highlights that existing AI systems largely target Western legal frameworks, focus on computationally heavy judgment prediction, or address narrow legal domains. The problem statement identifies key challenges in India’s legal ecosystem: complex legal language, poor accessibility, high costs, fragmented sources, and the need for simplified guidance.
Conclusion
A useful, approachable, and effective AI-powered legal assistant designed for Indian legal situations was described in this study. The technology greatly increases legal accessibility and awareness for general users through conversational engagement, document summarizing, and legal retrieval. According to experimental results, the assistant performs well in terms of correctness and clarity, making it appropriate for usage in educational and informative settings.
The technology significantly lowers informational barriers and improves public understanding, even though it is not meant to replace legal specialists. Future improvements, such as RAG integration, fine-tuning, multilingual capabilities, and reference checking, might make the assistant a highly influential instrument in India\'s judicial system.
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