Beyond Generic AI: Why the legal profession needs purpose-built tools

As AI adoption accelerates across India’s legal ecosystem, experts warn against relying on generic public AI tools. Data privacy risks, biased judgments, and compliance challenges are driving legal professionals toward domain-specific, secure AI platforms designed exclusively for the law.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly shaping how India works, governs, and conducts business—and the legal profession is no exception. From document review to case law analysis, AI-powered tools are transforming legal workflows by enabling faster research and greater operational efficiency.

However, the growing reliance on public or free AI platforms for legal work presents significant risks. These generic tools often store user inputs and reuse them for model training, creating serious concerns around confidentiality, unintended data disclosure, and compliance particularly under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA), which mandates explicit consent and lawful data processing.

Beyond data privacy, public AI systems frequently suffer from hallucinations—confidently generated but incorrect or misleading outputs caused by flawed or biased training data. In the legal domain, such inaccuracies can have grave consequences.

A recent example is Buckeye Trust v. Principal Commissioner of Income Tax (ITA No.1051/Bang/2024), where fabricated case names and citations appeared in judicial reasoning. In another instance, a senior advocate had to apologise before the Supreme Court after submitting pleadings containing fake precedents and misinterpreted questions of law—both reportedly sourced from AI-generated content. These incidents underline how unverified AI outputs can undermine judicial integrity and erode trust in technology.

The solution, experts argue, lies not in rejecting AI, but in adopting tools purpose-built for the law. As Justice H.R. Khanna famously observed, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”—a principle that applies equally to AI-driven legal research.

Manupatra’s AI Search and Manuworks.ai are designed with this vigilance at their core. Built on trusted legal databases, these platforms deliver traceable, explainable, and legally sound outputs within secure research environments. By embedding AI directly into the legal workflow, they help professionals move beyond keyword searches to concept-driven legal reasoning.

AI Search enables users to interrogate judgments, compare rulings side-by-side, generate AI gists and summaries, and extract key legal principles with precision—significantly reducing manual effort while maintaining reliability. Manuworks.ai complements this by offering lawyers a unified platform for drafting specialised legal documents, translating and comparing texts, generating case timelines, summarising content, and performing OCR on scanned materials.

What differentiates these tools from generic AI platforms is their governance framework. With SOC 2 Type II certification, AES-256 encryption, zero data retention policies, and auditable controls, they strike a balance between innovation and regulatory compliance.

As AI becomes integral to legal practice, the focus must shift from convenience to credibility. Purpose-built legal AI tools promise not only efficiency, but also accuracy, security, and trust—ensuring technology strengthens, rather than compromises, the foundations of legal work.