Every few years, a boring piece of plumbing shows up and quietly changes how legal work gets done. E-filing was one. The CNR number was another. In 2026, the plumbing with the most leverage for Indian legal teams is MCP, short for Model Context Protocol.
If you have seen a lawyer use ChatGPT or Claude and walk away frustrated, you have seen the problem MCP is built to solve. Generic AI does not know your case. It does not know your cause list. It has never heard of your CNR. MCP is how you hand it that context without copy-pasting, without losing accuracy, and without uploading client files to a third-party chat window.
The eCourtsIndia MCP is the Indian legal layer for this standard. It connects the AI model you already use to over 27 crore case records, 29,600 courts, and daily cause lists across every district court, High Court, NCLT, and the Supreme Court. This post explains what an MCP is, how ours works, and how any lawyer or legaltech team can be up and running in 90 seconds.
What is MCP, in two paragraphs
Model Context Protocol is an open standard Anthropic published in late 2024. It defines how an AI model calls external tools and data. Before MCP, every AI product had its own private plugin system. Your Claude plugin did not work in ChatGPT. Your ChatGPT plugin did not work in Cursor. The result was vendor lock-in and a graveyard of half-finished integrations.
MCP changed that by agreeing on one shape. A server offers tools. A client calls them. Any client that speaks MCP can use any MCP server. The analogy is USB-C. One port, many devices. Midpage launched a Claude MCP for US legal research in February 2026. CourtListener shipped its own MCP the same quarter. Legalcomplex is live. Anthropic’s own Claude Cowork legal plugin went GA around the same time. India has the data problem this standard was invented to solve, and we built for it.
What the eCourtsIndia MCP gives you
A short list of what the MCP exposes to any AI client you connect it to:
- Case search across every Indian court. Full-text Solr search over party names, advocates, judges, acts and sections, and the OCR-cleaned text of every order in the index.
- Case brief and case details. Pull the full history of a single CNR, including all listings, orders, IAs, linked matters, and the latest order text.
- Cause list. Filter by state, district, court complex, date, judge, advocate, or litigant. Used in everything from a solo advocate’s morning brief to a bank’s 100-matter tracker.
- Order and judgment retrieval.
get_order_markdownreturns the cleaned text of any order.get_order_ai_analysisadds structured summaries and extracted directions. - Portfolio monitoring. Subscribe to a list of CNRs. Get notified on any change: new listing, new order, disposal, party substitution, transfer.
- Court directory lookups. Move through the hierarchy:
get_states→get_districts→get_complexes→get_courts. Also enum lookups for case types, statuses, bench types, and High Court codes.
If you have read our Case Type Encyclopedia and Case Status Dictionary, you already know the vocabulary. The MCP just hands that vocabulary to your AI as callable tools.
A 90-second install, in plain English
Here is the fastest path from zero to your first answer.
- Open Claude Desktop, Claude Cowork, or any MCP-capable client.
- Add a new MCP server. Paste the URL from ecourtsindia.com/api/mcp.
- Sign in with the same email you use on eCourtsIndia. Your free tier is active immediately.
- Close the settings screen. You are done.
Your first prompt is the moment most people smile. Try one of these verbatim.
Pull my cause list for Delhi district courts for tomorrow. Sort by courtroom. Flag anything listed for Arguments.
Find all pending cheque bounce cases in UP High Court filed between 2022 and 2025 with orders in the last 30 days.
Give me the full brief for CNR DLHC010095422019. Include the latest order in English, not legalese.
The MCP handles the API calls, authentication, pagination, and formatting. You get an answer in prose, a table, or JSON, whichever the model decides is clearest for the question.
The nine tools you will actually use
| Tool name | What it does | Typical prompt |
|---|---|---|
search_cases |
Solr full-text search across all Indian courts | “Find SARFAESI matters in Karnataka HC decided in 2025” |
get_case_details |
Complete record for one CNR | “What happened on CNR DLHC…2019” |
get_case_brief |
AI-summarised one-page brief | “Give me a client-ready brief on this case” |
search_causelist |
Filter daily cause lists by advocate, judge, date | “My cause list for Monday across Delhi” |
get_order_markdown |
Clean text of any uploaded order | “Read the last order and tell me what the court said” |
get_order_ai_analysis |
Structured analysis: directions, reasoning, outcome | “Was the stay granted and on what conditions” |
monitor_portfolio |
Subscribe to changes across multiple CNRs | “Watch these 40 cases and alert me on any order” |
get_states, get_districts, get_complexes, get_courts |
Court hierarchy lookups | “What is the court code for Saket Family Court” |
lookup_enum |
152 case type codes, 71 status codes, 36 HC codes | “What does CRL_MA mean” |
What the MCP will not do, and why that is a feature
The eCourtsIndia MCP is read-only. It cannot e-file on your behalf. It cannot submit pleadings. It cannot write to services.ecourts.gov.in. It cannot change a hearing date. If a vendor offers AI that “automatically files” in Indian courts today, treat that claim with the same scepticism you would treat a stranger offering to sign your vakalatnama for you.
That restraint is intentional. The official e-Courts portal is a national asset built and maintained by the e-Committee of the Supreme Court of India. The services.ecourts.gov.in portal is, by design, conservative about automated writes and throttled on reads. Our view is that a private layer should be additive to the portal, not a workaround. The MCP extends what the portal already publishes publicly. Nothing more.
A comparison card for context
| Jurisdiction | Public data layer | MCP |
|---|---|---|
| United States | PACER, CourtListener | CourtListener MCP |
| Canada | CanLII | CanLII MCP |
| Research tools | Midpage, Legalcomplex | Midpage MCP, Legalcomplex MCP |
| India | services.ecourts.gov.in, NJDG | eCourtsIndia MCP |
What this unlocks for different teams
A solo advocate gets a 5 am cause list brief before their first chai. A mid-size firm gets a weekly portfolio digest without building a docket tool. A bank’s legal team tracks tens of thousands of Section 138 cheque bounce matters from one dashboard. A law student writes a dissertation chapter that cites live data instead of NJDG screenshots from 2020. A product engineer stops maintaining a scraper.
For a deeper dive into the data behind Indian cause lists and why most matters listed on any given day are not heard on merits, read our flagship piece on one week of Delhi cause lists. For a practical walkthrough on how a lawyer uses the MCP for the morning brief, see our 5 am cause list post. Both are linked at the bottom of this article.
Privacy, security, and the quiet part out loud
Every question you ask your AI model is visible to your AI provider. If you use Claude Desktop, Anthropic sees your prompts. If you use ChatGPT, OpenAI does. The MCP does not change that. What it does change is that the actual legal data the model reads is fetched live from our API under your key. We do not log the contents of your prompts. We do log the API calls you make, because we need to, for rate limiting and abuse prevention. Anonymised API call counts inform capacity planning. Names of litigants and parties in public court records are, by definition, public. Anything you type that is not already in a public court record stays between you and your AI client.
What this means for eCourtsIndia
If you are a lawyer, your AI is finally useful for Indian court work. If you are a builder, you can ship a product in a weekend that used to take a quarter. If you are a researcher, your data story is one prompt away from being written. The work now is not access. The work is the questions you ask and the answers you publish.
MCP is to legal AI what the CNR was to case tracking. The boring piece of plumbing that makes everything downstream possible.
Next steps
- Connect the MCP in 90 seconds at ecourtsindia.com/api/mcp.
- Try the three starter prompts above.
- If you hit a wall, email support or reply on our X profile.
Further reading: CNR Number Decoded, LLMs.txt for Indian Courts, Case Status Dictionary.