Legal Tech & AI for Law Practice

What this industry needs from software

A practising lawyer’s day is documents: judgments to search, case files to read, drafts to produce, dates to keep. Legal software has to fit into that day rather than ask the lawyer to change it. Three things follow.

• It has to live in Word. Drafting happens in Microsoft Word, full stop. A product that asks a lawyer to draft in a browser will be admired and then ignored. The AI has to arrive as a Word add-in.
• Search has to be plain English. “Cases where a resolution plan was rejected for undervaluing an operational creditor” is the query. The software’s job is to turn that into ranked, citable judgments.
• Data handling is a legal question. Case files are privileged. Documents must be encrypted at rest, never used to train a model, and access must be role-based, versioned and auditable - and the product has to say so, plainly, on the page.

Add the specifics of Indian practice - the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, NCLT matters, a Bar that ranges from students to Senior Advocates - and the brief becomes a full-stack product with a research engine, a chat-with-your-file interface, a drafting assistant inside Word, and a pricing ladder that runs from a student plan to a firm plan.

How we approached the build

This group is one product built over time. It started as DocuSwift AI: a two-lawyer practice managing high document volumes needed a way to organise files, auto-generate case summaries and run AI-assisted research. We built the first working version in three weeks - a full-stack Next.js and Node.js application on Azure, with the ChatGPT API for analysis and a custom Word plugin so drafting help appeared where the lawyer already was. Role-based access, document versioning, and an interface that needed almost no training.

That product grew, over more than a year of ongoing development, into Locus Standi - now positioned as an AI workspace for Indian legal practice: plain-English case search, case analysis, a Word add-in for drafting, and an Insolvency Copilot for end-to-end IBC matters. It is a product of Docuswift Solutions LLP and lists Microsoft for Startups and the NVIDIA Inception Program among its partners.

The lesson from this cluster is about sequence: ship a narrow, genuinely useful tool to real practitioners fast, then let their daily use decide what the product becomes.