NyayAI: Building an AI Legal Assistant for 1.4 Billion People — A Technical Deep Dive
I'm building a startup to make Indian law accessible to every lawyer, law student, and citizen in the country. Here's the technical story of how I went from zero to a working prototype — training a foundation model from scratch, fine-tuning on 4,000 instruction pairs, and building a production-ready RAG pipeline — all as a solo founder.
The Problem
India has 1.4 billion people and roughly 50 million active legal cases pending in its courts. Lawyers spend hours — sometimes days — digging through bare acts, constitutional articles, and decades of Supreme Court judgments just to find relevant precedents for a single case. The Indian legal system operates across 25+ High Courts, hundreds of tribunals, and a Supreme Court that has delivered judgments since 1950. The sheer volume is staggering.
And yet, the tooling available to lawyers is stuck in 2005. Paid databases like SCC Online and Manupatra charge thousands per month and still require manual keyword searches. Free resources like Indian Kanoon are search-only — no summaries, no analysis, no drafting. Generic AI tools like ChatGPT hallucinate case names, invent sections that don't exist, and have no depth in Indian law.
