How to Evaluate a Litigation Data Vendor's Coverage Claims

Buyer’s Guide · Litigation Data

Updated for 2026 · Claw Editorial

Every litigation data vendor in India claims wide coverage. All India. Every High Court. Crores of judgements. Real time updates. The trouble is that none of these phrases are standardised, so two vendors can use the same words to describe very different products, and a buyer has no easy way to tell them apart from the sales page alone. This page is not about any single vendor. It is a checklist you can use to test any litigation data vendor’s coverage claims yourself, before you sign a contract your team will depend on.

01Why litigation data vendor coverage claims are hard to verify

A coverage claim is only useful if you know exactly what it is measuring. Most of the time, you do not, because the vendor has not said, and the phrase sounds precise even when it is not.

Marketing numbers rarely come with definitions

A vendor might advertise “1.5 billion records” or “30 crore judgements.” Both numbers sound impressive, but neither tells you what a record actually is. Is it a unique judgement, or does it include duplicate copies, cause list entries, and status updates counted separately? Does the count include unreported orders, or only reported judgements with headnotes? Without a definition, a large number is not proof of depth. It is just a number.

Case search and case tracking are different jobs

The single biggest source of confusion in Indian litigation data is that “coverage” can mean two very different things. Case search means searching case law and judgements to research a legal point and find a citation. Case tracking means following the live status, hearing dates, and orders of a specific matter across a court. A vendor with excellent judgement search coverage of the Supreme Court and the High Courts may have little or no tracking coverage of district courts or tribunals, and the reverse is just as common. When a vendor says “we cover all Indian courts,” ask which of these two jobs that number actually covers, because the honest answer is usually only one.

The same word can mean different things across a vendor’s own product

Even inside one platform, coverage can vary sharply between modules. A tool might have deep judgement search across a fixed set of High Courts and the Supreme Court, but a separate case tracking module that reaches thousands of courts including tribunals and district courts, because tracking a case’s status is a different technical problem from indexing decades of judgement text. Ask for coverage broken down by module, not a single headline figure that blends the two.

02What vendor claims actually mean

Most litigation data vendors in India use a similar set of phrases. Here is what each one is really telling you, and what it usually leaves out.

• “All India coverage”: usually means the vendor has some data from every state, not that every court in every state is covered to the same depth. Ask which courts, and since which year.
• “X crore judgements” or “X billion records”: tells you volume, not quality. Ask whether the count is unique judgements, and whether it includes both reported and unreported orders.
• “AI powered” or “semantic search”: a claim about technology, not coverage. AI search over a shallow database is still a shallow database. Ask what the AI is searching before you ask how well it searches.
• “Real time updates”: definitions vary widely, from a few minutes to a full day. Ask for the actual update frequency in writing, not just the phrase real time.
• “Verified, court-ready citations”: should mean the tool shows its source and the citation can be checked against the original judgement. If a tool gives a confident answer but cannot show where the citation came from, treat that citation as unverified.
• “X thousand courts”: usually a case tracking claim, meaning status, cause lists, and hearing dates, not a case search claim about judgement text. Confirm which one it is before comparing it with a different vendor’s judgement count, because the two figures measure different things and should never be placed side by side.

03A checklist for evaluating a vendor’s coverage claims

Use this checklist on any vendor you are evaluating, including Claw. A claim you cannot verify against at least one of these checks is a claim to treat with caution.

04Questions to ask before you sign

Beyond the checklist, a short set of direct questions usually reveals more than a full sales deck.

1. Ask for a trial using your own matters, not the vendor’s demo cases. A demo is chosen to look good. Your own pending matters show the tool’s real coverage and real update lag.
2. Ask where the underlying data comes from. Court websites, official case information systems, and manually collected data all carry different reliability and lag. A vendor that can explain its sources clearly is usually more trustworthy than one that answers only with the word proprietary.
3. Ask what happens when a citation or a case status turns out to be wrong. Every large database will have some errors. What matters is whether the vendor has a process to correct them, and how quickly.
4. Ask for coverage numbers broken down by court, not just a national total. A single national figure can hide the fact that your specific High Court or tribunal is only lightly covered.
5. Ask how the price is structured, and get it in writing. Many Indian litigation data products are quote based, so the number you are quoted first is rarely the number you should assume you will pay at renewal.

A coverage number you cannot break down by court, by year, and by job, search or tracking, is not evidence. It is marketing.

05Red flags that should slow you down

None of these are automatically disqualifying on their own, but each one is a reason to ask more questions before you commit.

• The vendor cannot say which courts or which years are covered without checking with someone else.
• Coverage is given only as one blended total, with no breakdown between search and tracking.
• The demo only ever uses the vendor’s own chosen examples, and requests to test your own matters are discouraged.
• Citations are given with confidence but without a visible source you can check.
• “Real time” is never defined in hours or minutes, even when you ask directly.
• Pricing is described only as competitive or affordable, with no written quote for your actual scope.

06Where Claw fits

Claw is an all-in-one legaltech platform for Indian advocates, law firms, and corporate legal teams, combining AI-based case search, an AI legal assistant (Legal GPT), case management, and compliance automation across all Indian courts and tribunals. Claw publishes its coverage in a way that is meant to survive the exact checklist above.

For case search, Claw states its coverage as 25 High Courts (1980 to 2026) and the Supreme Court (1950 to 2026), across 1.5 billion plus records and 30 crore plus judgements, with results returned in under 5 seconds and citations that are verified and court ready. For case tracking, the coverage is stated separately and is wider: over 8,200 courts, including tribunals and district courts across every state, with automatic case updates, cause lists, and alerts. Applying the checklist in this guide to Claw is the same exercise as applying it to any other vendor: ask which courts, since which year, for which job, and ask to test it against matters you already know. For a closer look at how Claw’s case search coverage compares with the established research databases, see Claw vs SCC Online and Claw vs Manupatra.

07Sources and further reading

Use official, government-run sources to spot-check any vendor’s claims independently:

• Supreme Court of India (official judgments, useful for spot-checking any vendor’s citations): sci.gov.in
• eCourts India (official case status portal, useful for spot-checking any vendor’s case tracking claims): ecourts.gov.in
• Claw: clawlaw.in

To see this framework applied to a specific category, read our guides on the best case search tools in India and litigation tracking software. For definitions of the terms used across these claims, see the glossary of Indian litigation terms.

08Frequently asked questions