Advocates oppose mandatory e-filing system; to lay siege to HC on Jan 7

CHENNAI: The Joint Action Committee (JAC) of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry Advocates’ Associations has announced plans to lay siege to the Madras high court on Jan 7, 2026, protesting the introduction of mandatory e-filing in all subordinate courts across the state 'without adequate infrastructure in courts.

'The decision was made at a coordination committee meeting held on Dec 22 in Madurai. According to the resolutions adopted, the advocates reiterated their demand that the circular issued by the Madras high court making e-filing compulsory from Dec 1, should be withdrawn until basic infrastructure in all courts is improved.S Prabakaran, senior advocate and president of Tamil Nadu Advocates Association (TNAA), said the legal fraternity was not against the e-filing system.

Their demand is to have both e-filing and physical filing by advocates and litigants.The JAAC noted that an indefinite boycott of court work has been in force since Dec 5 in support of these demands. As the next phase of agitation, the committee has decided to mobilise advocates in large numbers to participate in the gherao protest on Jan 7, 2026.In addition, the JAAC has announced a boycott of e-filing training programmes proposed to be conducted through video conferencing on Dec 29, 30, and 31 and Jan 2, 2026.

Explaining the issue, advocate T Arun Kumar said, “the e-filing must be done in the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) format, which requires a special OCR scanner that costs around Rs 40,000. Not every advocate can afford this.”"If we do this in a computer centre, they charge Rs 10 per page in addition to service and internet charges. This will only add to the litigation cost. Also, the staff handling e-filing in the courts are undertrained, and the frequent malfunction of the server has become a huge obstacle in smooth filing," he added.Though the high court has implemented the e-filing system with the objective to digitise the court proceedings, they also insist on filing physical copies of the case documents, he pointed out.