The Judicial Data Collaborative was a community initiative convened by DAKSH to bring together legal practitioners, research organisations, technology experts and others who have an interest in what data the judiciary puts out and how it is presented and consumed by a variety of stakeholders.  

Accessibility and understanding of judicial data are essential to making courts and tribunals more transparent, accountable and easy to navigate for litigants. In recent years, eCourts services and various Court and tribunals’ websites have made a large volume of data about cases available. This has expanded the window into judicial functioning and enabled more empirical research on the role of courts in the protection of citizens’ rights. Such research can also assist busy courts to understand patterns of litigation and practice and can help engage across disciplines with stakeholders to improve the functioning of courts.

These individuals and organisations have individually developed different processes to remove noise, identify outliers, classify case and hearing-level data, map case life cycles, develop appropriate metrics, and mask personal information in the judicial data sets. The time has come for all interested parties to collaborate and combine their efforts to create a shared vocabulary and to develop common standards for such analyses.