C ourt N av: Voice-Guided, Anchor-Accurate Navigation of Long Legal Documents in Courtrooms (2025)

Abstract: Judicial work depends on close reading of longrecords, charge sheets, pleadings, annexures,orders, often spanning hundreds of pages. Withlimited staff support, exhaustive reading duringhearings is impractical. We present CourtNav,a voice-guided, anchor-first navigator for legalPDFs that maps a judge’s spoken command(e.g., “go to paragraph 23”, “highlight the contradiction in the cross-examination”) directlyto a highlighted paragraph in seconds. CourtNav transcribes the command, classifies intentwith a grammar-first, LLM-backed router, retrieves over a layout-aware hybrid index, andauto-scrolls the viewer to the cited span whilehighlighting it and close alternates. By design, the interface shows only grounded pas-sages, never free text, keeping evidence verifiable and auditable. This need is acute in India, where judgments and cross-examinations notoriously long.In a pilot on representative charge sheets, pleadings, and orders, median time-to-relevance drops from 3–5 minutes (manual navigation) to 10–15 seconds;with quick visual verification included, 30–45seconds. Under fixed time budgets, thisnavigation-first design increases the breadth ofthe record actually consulted while preservingcontrol and transparency

## introduction high-volume courts routinely face long filings and crowded dockets (often dozens of matters per day) which leads to massive case delays @xcite . despite near-universal digitization (e-courts) and access to case data at scale, the core interaction problem remains: how can a judge interrogate a voluminous record quickly and faithfully? summaries aid orientation but can hide citations and miss pivotal passages, even retrieval-augmented systems sometimes surface mis-grounded references @xcite . adjudication prioritizes verifiability: decision-makers must jump to the exact locus in the record and see it highlighted. we therefore target navigation, not paraphrase. we present a voice-guided, anchor-first navigator for long legal pdfs that converts a spoken command (e.g., "go to paragraph 23") into a highlighted paragraph within seconds. the system couples layout-aware indexing and anchor generation over scanned/structured pdfs, a constrained command grammar with llm back-off for coverage, hybrid retrieval with de-duplication, and a viewer that auto-scrolls while preserving on-screen evidence. our primary contributions are: long-document qa and retrieval in law. legal qa and retrieval have evolved from sentencelevel factoid questions to long-form answers grounded in statutes and case law. benchmark tasks span holding extraction (e.g., casehold (zheng et al., 2021)), case-retrieval datasets such as lecard/lecardv2 @xcite , and broader evaluation suites like legalbench @xcite . more recent resources target longform qa (e.g., lleqa, legal-lfqa) @xcite . while these emphasize retrieval quality and reasoning, they operate at the document level, returning entire cases rather than pinpointed spans, and are not designed for judge-facing inter-action loops. summarization for legal documents. faithfulness remains a central challenge. surveys and long-context datasets (e.g., casesumm) catalog hallucination modes and metric gaps @xcite . general summarization work similarly shows unsupported content in abstractive outputs @xcite . summaries aid orientation but do not replace the need to jump to the exact place in the record. evidence-first interfaces. outside law, explainable qa resources require systems to surface supporting sentences (e.g., hotpotqa @xcite ) and page-level localization for document images (docvqa) @xcite , improving interpretability. however, most legal qa/summarization systems return text without a ui that enforces verification. prior legal qa/summarization and docvqa work does not focus on navigation as we do: a voice-guided, anchor-first interface that maps spoken commands to highlighted paragraphs. our system combines long-document indexing, hybrid retrieval, a domain-adapted query router, and a judgefacing viewer that enforces verification. to the best of our knowledge, we are the first ones to attempt building such a system for the legal domain. ## conclusion query type baseline ours (seconds) (seconds) temporal 10 ± 2.0 5 ± 0.5 contextual 200 ± 15.0 6 ± 1.0 summarization -6 ± 1.2