Time is of the essence
Pravin Anand and Lakshmi Kruttika Vijay consider how India is adapting IP legislation to tackle delays to justice.
The time revolution is in its critical phase, a phase where the importance of time for the court, litigant, witnesses and lawyers has been emphasised and in some cases even mandated.
The seed for this phase was planted not long after the first four-month order was pronounced by the Supreme Court. In 2009, in the case Koninklijke Philips Electronics v M Bathla, the High Court of Delhi took note of undue delays in conducting the trial and limited the number of hours that a witness could be cross examined to three hours each.
Over the next few years, several judges in other IP cases insisted that cross-examination be scheduled and take place on a certain number of days for more than four hours every day.
This article was published in Managing IP’s Intellectual Property Focus 2015.