One of the underlying ideas behind Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) is to make it so simple that even a layman can go on a website, file a complaint, and get a dispute resolved in a hassle-free manner. But can it really be so simple in practice?
A question that keeps coming up in every discussion about ODR is: where do lawyers fit in? Some consider ODR to be inherently self-serving and workable without ever engaging a lawyer; others feel lawyers are going to be a permanent part of the process regardless.
This piece looks at how that's actually panning out in India today.
ODR and Lawyers
Ethan Katsh and Janet Rifkin's classic framing of ODR, that it rests on convenience, trust, and expertise, still holds up well. ODR is meant to be for the masses: something people use from home, with nothing more than a basic comfort with computers as a prerequisite.
It fails if it's difficult for ordinary people to use, or if it ends up favouring people with better internet, better devices, or more digital literacy than their counterpart.
The point of ODR is largely lost if the aggrieved party still has to go find a lawyer to file even a small-value claim, and small-value claims are exactly the area most ODR platforms in India target.
In Small Causes Courts and Consumer Courts, litigants are still, in principle, encouraged to represent themselves, on the theory that engaging a lawyer for a low-value claim costs more than the claim itself is worth.
In practice this rarely happens: people are reluctant to represent themselves, either because they doubt their own competence or because the process, filing a plaint, submitting a rejoinder, and so on, is genuinely difficult for a layman to navigate without professional help, or the fear of getting it wrong.
For ODR to actually deliver on its promise, that has to change, and it needs mechanisms designed for it, not just an interface.
Where ODR Can Genuinely Work Without a Lawyer
E-commerce disputes, breach-of-contract claims, and loan-repayment issues remain the areas where ODR can be the most self-serving. These aren't legally complex matters, and the audience for them, increasingly online, increasingly aware of consumer rights, doesn't need a lawyer standing between them and a resolution.
India's institutional infrastructure has actually caught up with this idea in a meaningful way over the past few years. The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 gave ODR a statutory hook for consumer disputes, and the revamped e-Daakhil portal now lets a consumer file and track a complaint end-to-end without a lawyer as a precondition.1
The National Consumer Helpline has leaned into AI-driven, sector-specific triage of complaints, and complaint volumes have climbed sharply as a result, from roughly 12,500 a month a decade ago to well over 1.5 lakh a month now, alongside meaningfully faster average resolution times.2
Sector regulators have built their own equivalents too: SEBI's SmartODR handles investor–market disputes, the MSME ministry's Samadhaan portal handles delayed-payment complaints from small businesses, and Bima Bharosa does the same for insurance grievances.3
None of these were designed to require a lawyer at the front door, and that's largely by design, backed by NITI Aayog's 2021 policy plan for scaling ODR adoption in India.4
Private platforms fill much of the rest of the gap. SAMA, for instance, handles mediation, arbitration, and conciliation for banks, NBFCs, insurers, and e-commerce platforms, often as an empanelled part of a company's own grievance process, so a dispute gets routed into ODR before it ever has a chance to become a court case.5
That's a genuinely useful model: it doesn't rely on an individual claimant's own initiative or legal savvy to get the dispute into the system in the first place.
In more complex matters, say, a dispute involving genuine questions of interpretation or liability, the choice is usually between hiring counsel or being assisted by the presiding neutral (the arbitrator or mediator) directly, which is broadly the model UNCITRAL has recommended: a neutral, appointed by the ODR administrator, assists both parties impartially rather than either side needing separate legal representation.
Whether India's complicated procedural rules exist because they're necessary for justice, or mainly because they're useful for lining lawyers' pockets, is a question every legal system eventually has to answer for itself, and ODR is as good a place as any to test it.
With respect to drafting documents, the underlying idea is still that a form should be comprehensive enough that filling it out requires no special skill.
That's not an unreasonable bar, platforms like peopleclaim.com and Rechtwijzer showed it was achievable years ago, and India's own guided digital forms (e-Daakhil among them) are edging closer to it.
The AI Question
The newest wrinkle in all of this is that a self-represented person no longer needs a simplified form to avoid a lawyer, they can just ask a generative AI chatbot to draft the complaint, the rejoinder, or the legal argument itself.
This is reshaping self-representation everywhere, not just in India. In the United States, researchers analysing millions of federal civil filings found that the share of pro se (self-represented) plaintiffs rose sharply after generative AI tools became widely available, with AI-consistent drafting showing up disproportionately among first-time filers.6
The catch is that these more polished-looking filings haven't actually performed better in outcome terms, they're dismissed more often and terminate earlier than filings without AI markers, a pattern researchers have termed a "litigation-efficacy paradox": more people can now produce something that looks like a proper legal filing, without that translating into a better shot at an actual remedy.7
A number of U.S. courts have responded with standing orders warning pro se litigants that AI-assisted filings carry real risk, including sanctions, given how often fabricated case citations turn up.8
This cuts both ways for ODR specifically. On the optimistic side, an AI assistant that helps someone understand what a "rejoinder" actually is, or fills out an e-Daakhil form correctly, removes exactly the kind of friction that used to send people to a lawyer even for a claim worth a few thousand rupees.
Access-to-justice researchers broadly agree generative AI can meaningfully help self-represented litigants navigate procedure, so long as it's paired with realistic expectations about its limits and some human checkpoint for anything substantive.9
On the less optimistic side, an AI system can generate a confident-sounding but legally weak complaint just as easily as a well-founded one, and unlike a lawyer, it rarely tells a client outright that a claim isn't worth pursuing.
For ODR platforms and consumer forums, that means the real design challenge isn't just building a simple interface anymore. It's building a system, whether human-mediated, AI-assisted, or some combination, that helps people file good claims, not just claims that are easy to file.
Where Lawyers Actually Fit In
Put together, the picture for lawyers in Indian ODR today looks like this:
- Small-value, low-complexity disputes (e-commerce, consumer, loan repayment) remain the strongest case for keeping lawyers largely out of the process, and India's policy infrastructure, e-Daakhil, the National Consumer Helpline, Samadhaan, Bima Bharosa, has genuinely built toward that outcome rather than just gesturing at it.
- Referral and trust-building is still a role lawyers play in practice: someone facing a legal problem still tends to consult a lawyer first, and whether that lawyer endorses or dismisses ODR does a lot to determine whether the client trusts the process. Appointing a lawyer for a claim worth a few thousand rupees still makes no rational sense for either the client or the lawyer, but the lawyer's opinion of ODR, formed elsewhere, still shapes whether a client ever gets there.
- Complex or high-value matters still call for either counsel or a skilled neutral doing that job on both parties' behalf, and the risks around AI-assisted self-representation abroad are a useful caution here: filings can look sophisticated without the underlying case being any stronger.
- A newer role is emerging for legal professionals and platform designers alike: building the guardrails around AI-assisted self-representation, so that it functions like a well-designed intake process rather than an over-eager, unaccountable advisor egging on weak claims.
Would ODR be able to accomplish what Shakespeare's character proposed in Henry VI, however facetious the reference, remains an open question. What's clearer is that the debate in 2026 isn't only "where do lawyers fit in?" anymore.
It's increasingly "where does AI fit in, and who makes sure it doesn't just become a faster way to file a claim that was never going to succeed?"
Endnotes
1. "Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) in India", IJLSI, on the Consumer Protection Act 2019 and the revamped e-Daakhil portal:
https://ijlsi.com/wp-content/uploads/Online-Dispute-Resolution-ODR-in-India.pdf ↩
2. Deccan Herald, "AI-enabled Consumer Helpline sees surge in complaints, faster resolution":
3. Harshith Viswanath, "Mapping India's ODR Stack: From Backlog to Blockchain," on SEBI SmartODR, the Samadhaan portal, and Bima Bharosa:
https://harshithviswanath.substack.com/p/mapping-indias-odr-stack-from-backlog ↩
4. NITI Aayog, "Designing the Future of Dispute Resolution: The ODR Policy Plan for India," Press Information Bureau release:
https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1776202 ↩
5. The Better India, "Looking for a Lawyer? Startup Helps Resolve Disputes Outside Courts, Solved 35 Lakh Cases Online," on SAMA's work resolving banking, financial, insurance, and broker disputes:
6. Or Cohen-Sasson, "The New Pro Se: Generative AI and the Surge in Federal Civil Self-Representation," arXiv:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29493 ; see also "Artificial Access to Justice: AI and the Surge in Pro Se Litigation," SSRN:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6864398 ↩
7. Or Cohen-Sasson, "Artificial Access to Justice: AI and the Surge in Pro Se Litigation," SSRN, which coins the term "litigation-efficacy paradox" for this finding:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6864398 ↩
8. ArentFox Schiff, "AI-Powered Pro Se Litigation Is Flooding Federal Courts: What Businesses Need to Know," on court standing orders and sanctions risk:
9. Thomson Reuters Institute, "Scaling Justice: How technology is reshaping support for self-represented litigants":
10. Cyberjustice Laboratory, Université de Montréal, "AI Tools, Self-Represented Litigants, and the Future of Access to Justice":