Legal research is the work of finding out what the law says about a problem: which statute applies, and what the courts have decided in similar cases. Lawyers do it before they advise a client or argue a case. Ordinary people do a simpler version of it when they search the web to understand a dispute.
In India, the past judgments of courts guide later decisions. A judgment of the Supreme Court binds every court in the country. So a lawyer's research draws on three kinds of material. Statutes are the laws passed by Parliament or a state legislature. Case law is the judgments of courts. Commentary is books and articles in which experts explain the law.
Here is a typical case. The owner of a small garment unit in Tiruppur has supplied T-shirts worth ₹4 lakh to a buyer in Delhi. Ninety days later, the buyer still has not paid. First, the owner searches the web in plain words. An online lawyer directory explains the options in plain language. It says that a buyer must pay a registered micro or small enterprise within the agreed period, which cannot be more than 45 days. A buyer who pays late owes compound interest at three times the bank rate set by the RBI.
Next, the owner buys a legal notice from an online legal service for a set fee. A legal notice is a formal letter that states the claim and gives a deadline. A lawyer on the service drafts it and sends it to the buyer. The buyer replies that the goods were faulty, and refuses to pay. Now the owner needs a lawyer for the case itself, and hires one listed in the directory.
The lawyer starts with a legal AI assistant. She asks it, in plain English, whether a buyer can refuse to pay after accepting goods without complaint. Within a minute, it drafts a two-page research memo that cites six judgments. But AI models sometimes invent cases that do not exist, and state them with full confidence. This is called AI hallucination. So the lawyer opens each cited judgment in a legal research database. Its citator shows whether a later court has followed or overruled each one. One of the six has been overruled, so she drops it. The final memo is hers, not the model's. This way of working is called human in the loop.
Who pays for all of this? Law firms, companies' legal teams, courts and law schools pay yearly subscriptions to the research databases. The judgments themselves are public. The publishers sell the work around them: summaries, links between cases and the citator. Ordinary people mostly read the articles for free. They pay a fixed fee for a standard document, instead of a lawyer's fee for each hour or each hearing, which is described in billable hours.