You have heard the talk. That a computer is deciding cases in Pakistan. That judges have been replaced by a machine. None of that is true. But something real is happening inside the courts, and you should know what it is before you file your next case.
What the Supreme Court of Pakistan has said
In March 2025 the Supreme Court decided Ishfaq Ahmed v. Mushtaq Ahmed (PLD 2025 SC 582). The court was blunt. AI can help a judge with research, drafting and case management. It cannot decide a case. The judgment said AI tools must always stay under the judge's own reasoning, and warned that AI used in bail or sentencing decisions can carry hidden bias.
The same court, in Abdul Salam Khan v. Bank Al-Habib (PLD 2025 SC 1043), called a modern and intelligent case management system a constitutional responsibility of the judiciary. It told judges to use AI for scheduling and sorting cases. So the rule in Pakistan today is simple. AI is an assistant. The judge stays the judge.
The national AI guidelines for courts
In April 2026 the National Judicial Policy Making Committee issued the National Guidelines for the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Judicial Institutions. They cover every court in the country, from the Supreme Court down to the smallest magistrate's court.
What judges may use AI for:
- Case management and scheduling, translating documents, transcribing hearings and writing administrative reports
- Legal research through AI search engines that find case law and statutes
- Predicting how long a case may take, so court time can be planned
- Initial summaries of case documents and help with organising evidence
Every use must keep a human in the loop. The judge records their own reasoning at every AI assisted step. AI output must be traceable, so a judge can point at the exact part a machine produced. The guidelines prefer systems built locally and trained on Pakistani law.
What is actually running today
Three things are already live.
The Sindh High Court built its own AI search engine called LRC-Assistant. It works like a chatbot and pulls up orders, case diaries and judicial records. The court launched it in May 2026 together with the CFMS app, which lets lawyers and litigants check case information on their phones, as reported by Dawn.
Researchers also built a custom AI assistant for trial court judges called JudgeGPT. It was tested with the Federal Judicial Academy and given to 1,559 judges in 118 courts. According to the study reported in July 2026, judges with proper training resolved about 1,848 more cases a year, a rise of 6.3 percent.
Training is spreading too. The Punjab Judicial Academy runs a course called Generative AI for Legal Decision Making. Even before all this, in 2023 a district judge in Mandi Bahauddin used ChatGPT to research the grounds of an injunction, then wrote his own judgment. He did not decide the case on what the chatbot said.
What it means for your case in Pakistan
Your case will still be decided by a person. A judge reads your file, listens to the evidence and writes the judgment. The machine may help find a similar case or summarise a long file, but the final call is human.
AI also changes the evidence side. Courts now see videos and images that may have been made or edited by AI. In Mir Hassan v. The State (2025 YLR 645) the Balochistan High Court refused to rely on a video because the police had not sent it for forensic analysis to check whether it was doctored. Under the Qanun-e-Shahadat Order 1984, electronic evidence is accepted when the system that produced it was working properly, and courts keep the power to verify. A fake video can hurt the side that presents it.
The same care applies at home. Not everything an AI tool says is true. Know how to check a legal AI before you trust it, and remember that fake case citations are a real danger. If you ever need to prove something in court, the rules on evidence decide what counts.
If a machine ever makes a decision about you, know your rights when an algorithm decides in Pakistan.
More plain language guides on Pakistani law are on the Lexiber blog, and you can start from the Lexiber home page. Every guide is written to help you know the law before you walk into a court.Ask Lexiber free in English or Urdu. It shows you the exact section behind every answer.
