On 20 August 2026, Indian LegalTech Network (ILTN) partnered with Jindal Global University’s Ideate Lab to host the second LegalTech Strategic Roundtable at New Delhi’s Chelmsford Club. The invitation-only gathering brought together purchasers of legal AI and its creators, such as law-firm partners, heads of legal technology, in-house counsel, enterprise CIOs and CDOs, founders, and experts on AI governance plus legal-data infrastructure. The aim was practical: agree on what a fair standard for evaluating legal AI tools in India should contain.
Barriers to adoption
The roundtable revisited the first session from 27 November 2025, which asked why legal tech adoption in India is shallow despite the market’s size. Participants identified six barriers: firms treating legal tech as a discretionary cost, international tools being built for standardised jurisdictions while domestic tools lose scale through heavy customisation, poor prompting skills leading to underuse, and no shared metrics for accuracy, hallucination rates, or workflow fit. Case law databases are fragmented with no standard legal taxonomy, and there is no shared way to recognise vendors that voluntarily adopt governance frameworks.
The session proposed three responses: a state-specific Legal Enablement Toolkit built as a public-private partnership; a Universal Case Law Interface (UCLI), a single authoritative case law repository pitched as “UPI for case law”; and a Product Assessment Matrix, a neutral platform that matches lawyers to tools by practice, firm size and budget. This session focused on the third proposal: turning the Product Assessment Matrix into a working checklist. ILTN sent tailored questionnaires to more than 20 buyers and builders beforehand to set the agenda.
Participants proposed a Universal Case Law Interface as a single repository. This meeting focused on making that matrix a practical checklist.
Defining the framework
“Every buyer asks how they’ll know a tool works for their practice. Every builder says they can prove it. This roundtable was about writing down what that proof should look like,” said Shreya Vajpei, Founder of ILTN. The group noted that expectations on governance and ROI need to vary by use case, buyer type, and organisational maturity rather than applying a single universal standard. The roundtable report is available here, and Version 1 of the Buyer Framework will be published in November 2026.
