Ever wondered how the lawyers quote year old cases in court trails. How do they even know which year to look at and search for latest cases for citation? LegalCrystal is a product from a Bangalore based startup trying to solve this very problem. 
LegalCrystal is a law search engine for India . While there are many online and offline tools available for searching databases of year old cases, LegalCrystal is differentiating itself through its search engine. They claim to have a better search technology that makes the tool more efficient for users. The data is fetched from judis.nic.in and indiacode.nic.in. Search can be performed to obtain pertinent High Court and Supreme Court judgments with Citations and Casenotes. LegalCrystal is a paid service for professionals, with subscriptions starting at Rs.15,000 per annum.
Here is what the founder has to say.
What is your differentiator?
Every judgment is sent to a panel of advocates , they pick out important points from every judgment and write the GIST(Casenote) of the judgment and every judgment is formatted properly with proper para phrasing and keypoints are highlighted. For the Search to be effective, our advocates pick important catchwords from every judgment and put it in the index. It’s not just searching the whole text of the judgment. With intelligence put forth by the advocates the search works efficiently. Every judgment has case analysis, which displays the analysis of the decision made by the judge based on another similar judgment or cited judgment. Inside every judgment , the cited judgment are hyperlinked manually, we don’t use regular expression or any other code to link judgments.
With the internet growing, is there a demand for CD burned data?
We have reached Taluk/District level advocates, they still trust offline version (CD) of our product as they are worried about paying for the internet bill and somehow they feel good if we give them a CD / PenDrive for the amount that they paid rather than just the username and password for the online version.
IndianKanoon (Our coverage) is another startup that is addressing the same problem and is free. The source of data for both these startups are same. Though i haven’t tested for real use case but there does seem to be some kind of variation when it comes to throwing results. Which is better? You play and decide.
Give LegalCrystal a spin and share your views.
[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He is the founder of FindYogi]
