Are We Training Lawyers for Courts That Can’t Cope?
India has never lacked legal talent. From trial courts to constitutional benches, our legal tradition is rich, rigorous, and deeply respected. Yet, in 2026, a quiet but pressing question confronts us: are we training lawyers for a justice system that can no longer cope with the volume, velocity, and variety of disputes placed before it?
The numbers are familiar and sobering. Crores of cases pending across courts, with litigants waiting years, sometimes decades for a resolution. Judges work under immense pressure, infrastructure struggles to keep pace, and procedural complexity often outlives the dispute itself. None of this is new. What is new is the continued insistence that the primary answer lies in producing more court oriented lawyers, trained almost exclusively for adversarial litigation, as though the system has infinite capacity to absorb them.
This is not a critique of courts. Courts are indispensable. They are guardians of rights, arbiters of last resort, and the bedrock of constitutional order. Nor is this a critique of litigation as a discipline because good litigators are essential to justice. The concern is structural: when nearly all legal education is designed around courtroom combat, while the system itself is gasping for breath, something is fundamentally misaligned.
At ADRODR India, we work at the fault line where disputes actually live witnessing commercial relationships under strain, families in conflict, partnerships fraying, institutions facing operational risk. What we see repeatedly is that many disputes reaching courts are not legal failures, but resolution failures. They escalate not because the law is unclear, but because no structured, credible resolution pathway was activated early enough.
Our legal training still treats litigation as the default outcome of disagreement. Students are taught how to argue, how to draft pleadings, how to win. Far less time is spent on how to prevent disputes, how to de escalate conflict, how to design resolution frameworks, or how to help parties reach durable outcomes. The result is predictable: every disagreement becomes a case, every case becomes a backlog statistic.
There is a certain old world romance attached to courtroom advocacy and it deserves respect. But tradition was never meant to become inertia. The law has always evolved alongside society. Today’s disputes are faster, more technical, more relational, and often cross-border. They demand tools beyond adversarial binaries of winner and loser. They demand negotiation, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, and hybrid processes that courts themselves increasingly encourage.
Indian law already recognises this reality. Section 89 of the Code of Civil Procedure, court annexed mediation centres, pre litigation mediation mandates, the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, and now the Mediation Act, 2023. They all signal a clear policy direction. The judiciary has spoken repeatedly about the necessity of alternative dispute resolution to reduce court burden. Yet, paradoxically, ADR remains peripheral in legal education and professional identity.
This gap has consequences. Young lawyers enter practice believing courtroom litigation is the only “real” lawyering. ADR is seen as optional, secondary, or something to pursue later. Clients, advised by counsel trained primarily for battle, are pushed into litigation even when collaboration would better serve their interests. Courts, in turn, are flooded with matters that could and should have been resolved elsewhere.
There is also a human cost. Litigation is expensive, slow, and emotionally draining. When disputes that are essentially commercial misunderstandings or interpersonal conflicts are forced into adversarial molds, relationships are destroyed along with time and capital. Justice may eventually arrive, but often too late to matter.
The solution is not to abandon courts, but to rebalance the ecosystem. Law schools must train lawyers not just as advocates, but as dispute managers. ADR should be a core professional skill, taught with the same seriousness as civil procedure or evidence. Students should learn how to assess when litigation is necessary and when it is not. They should understand how to guide clients through negotiation, mediation, and arbitration with ethical clarity and procedural competence.
From a forward looking perspective, this is also about employability and professional resilience. Courts cannot absorb every law graduate as a litigator. But industries, institutions, governments, and communities desperately need lawyers who can resolve disputes efficiently. The future lawyer must be multi modal: court ready when required, but resolution first by design.
At ADRODR India, our mission is grounded in this philosophy. We believe dispute resolution is not a retreat from justice, but an evolution of it. A system that resolves disputes early, fairly, and intelligently strengthens courts by reserving judicial time for matters that truly require adjudication. That is respect for tradition, not its rejection.
So, are we training lawyers for courts that can’t cope? At present, too often, yes. But we can change course. By aligning legal education, professional incentives, and institutional practice with the realities of modern disputes, we can build a justice ecosystem that is efficient, humane, and sustainable. Courts will then do what they do best while lawyers do what society needs most: resolve conflict wisely.
Author: Pavani Sibal is the CEO of ADRODR India. The views expressed are personal.
