The Supreme Court has continued to expand mandatory and optional e-filing across categories of cases as part of its e-Courts Phase III rollout, building on the case-management portal that already allows advocates-on-record to file petitions, track listing, and download orders without a physical filing counter visit.
For practitioners, the practical change is less about the option to file electronically — that has existed for some time — and more about the increasing expectation that scanned paper-books meet formatting and OCR-searchability standards, since defective e-filings are now returned faster and with more specific formatting objections than before.
Litigants outside Delhi benefit most: e-filing removes the need to engage a Delhi-based filing agent purely to lodge and correct paperwork, provided the filing advocate is comfortable with the portal's document specifications. The Court has also expanded video-conferencing facilities for mentioning and urgent listing applications.
The Bar's main outstanding concern remains the pace of processing corrections flagged by the registry, which practitioners say still creates listing delays comparable to physical filing in some benches.