The Commercial Courts Act, 2015 was the most ambitious attempt in a generation to change how Indian civil litigation actually runs. It did not create new substantive law. It took the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 and amended it, for a defined class of dispute, in ways that were clearly borrowed from jurisdictions where commercial cases move faster: front-loaded disclosure, case management hearings, summary judgment, hard deadlines for pleadings, and a costs regime meant to make delay expensive.
Roughly a decade on, the honest assessment is mixed in an interesting way. The Act unambiguously changed the form of commercial litigation: the pleadings look different, the disclosure obligations are real, and the procedural vocabulary in a commercial suit is not the vocabulary of an ordinary suit. Whether it changed the speed is much harder to establish, and where the evidence is thin the reasons are worth examining, because they point at the levers that would actually work.
What the Act Actually Does
Three things, and it is worth separating them because they have had very different fates.
It creates a forum
Commercial courts at district level, and Commercial Divisions in those High Courts that exercise ordinary original civil jurisdiction. The Commercial Appellate Division is wider than the Commercial Division and the two are routinely conflated: Section 5 requires the Chief Justice to constitute one after a notification under Section 3(1) or an order under Section 4(1), so a High Court in a State that has notified commercial courts has a Commercial Appellate Division whether or not it exercises ordinary original civil jurisdiction. In practice, commercial courts at district level are frequently designated existing courts rather than new establishments.
It defines a class of dispute
A long statutory definition of commercial dispute covering ordinary transactions between merchants, construction and infrastructure contracts, intellectual property, franchising, distribution, joint ventures, shareholders agreements and much else, above a specified value. The 2018 amendment lowered that threshold substantially, from one crore rupees to three lakh, which vastly expanded what the Act covers.
It amends procedure
This is the substance of the reform. The amendments to the Code apply to commercial disputes and change disclosure, pleadings deadlines, case management, summary judgment and costs.
The third of these is where the ambition sits. It is worth setting out precisely, because practitioners who have not run a commercial suit tend to underestimate how different it is.
| Mechanism | What it requires | How it has fared |
|---|---|---|
| Written statement in a fixed period | A defendant must file a written statement within thirty days, extendable to a maximum of one hundred and twenty days from service, after which the right to file stands forfeited | This one bites. The Supreme Court has held the outer limit to be mandatory, and courts have applied it. It is the clearest behavioural change the Act produced. |
| Disclosure of documents | The plaintiff must file a list and copies of all documents in its power, possession, control or custody, and the defendant must do likewise, with a statement of truth. Documents not disclosed cannot ordinarily be relied on without leave | Substantially changed drafting practice. Front-loading documents is now normal in commercial suits, though the quality of disclosure varies enormously. |
| Statement of truth | Pleadings and disclosure must be verified by a statement of truth in the prescribed form | Adopted formally. Whether it has changed the candour of pleadings is a question nobody has good evidence about. |
| Case management hearing | The court is to hold a case management hearing and fix a schedule for the entire proceeding, including dates for evidence and arguments, with limits on oral arguments | Underused. This is the most powerful tool in the Act and the one most dependent on the individual judge. Where a court runs case management seriously, timelines improve markedly. |
| Summary judgment | A party may apply for judgment without recording oral evidence where the other side has no real prospect of succeeding on a claim or defence | Used far less than the drafters expected. Indian civil practice has no deep tradition of disposing of claims on paper, and applications frequently fail or get rolled into the main hearing. |
| Costs | A costs regime under which the losing party generally pays, and under which conduct including delay may be taken into account | Real but modest. Costs awarded are typically well below the actual cost of litigating, which limits the deterrent effect the provision was meant to have. |
| Pre-institution mediation | A suit that does not contemplate urgent interim relief cannot be instituted without first exhausting pre-institution mediation | Held to be mandatory by the Supreme Court in 2022. In practice it is very often a formality that a party attends and does not engage with, though it has generated a genuine mediation infrastructure that did not exist before. |
The Mediation Requirement, and What It Reveals
The pre-institution mediation provision is worth dwelling on because it illustrates the pattern that runs through the whole Act. The requirement is that a plaintiff must exhaust mediation before instituting a suit, unless the suit contemplates urgent interim relief. The Supreme Court held in 2022 that this is mandatory, not directory, so that a suit filed without complying is liable to be rejected.
What happened next is instructive. The exception, for suits contemplating urgent interim relief, became the route by which the requirement is very often bypassed. A plaintiff who wants to be in court rather than in mediation pleads urgency, and whether the urgency is genuine is a question the court can examine but rarely does at the threshold with any intensity. Meanwhile, parties who do attend mediation frequently attend without any intention of settling, because attendance is the requirement and engagement is not enforceable.
This is a reform that changed the form completely and the behaviour partially. Which is, in one sentence, the story of the Act.
Procedure changes what parties file. Only enforcement changes how long things take.
Every mechanism in the Act that carries an automatic consequence has worked. The written statement deadline works because the right to file is forfeited. Every mechanism that depends on judicial time and initiative, case management, summary judgment, meaningful costs, has worked unevenly, because it competes for the same scarce resource as everything else on the board. The Act redistributed obligations onto parties and left the enforcement obligations with an unchanged bench.
Has Anything Actually Gotten Faster?
This is the question the article is named for, and the honest answer requires acknowledging how hard it is to measure.
The comparison group problem
To know whether commercial courts are faster, you need to compare them with what the same disputes would have experienced otherwise. But the Act redefined the category, so the comparison group has changed. And the 2018 threshold reduction pulled in a large volume of smaller disputes that are structurally different from the ones the Act was originally aimed at.
The designation problem
Where a commercial court is a designated existing court, no capacity has been added. The same judge now runs a commercial docket with additional procedural requirements on top of a full board. Any speed gain has to come from procedure alone, because there is no more judicial time than there was.
The stages where time is actually lost
- Service on the defendant. The written statement clock only starts on service, and service failure is as much a problem in commercial suits as anywhere else. The Act does not address it.
- Interim applications. Injunction applications, and appeals against orders on them, take the record upward and stop the suit. This is where the largest single block of commercial litigation time goes.
- Admission and denial of documents. Front-loaded disclosure produces large document sets, and the process of admitting and denying them is frequently protracted.
- Recording of evidence. Cross-examination before a commissioner proceeds at the pace the parties and the commissioner allow, and the Act imposes no meaningful discipline here.
- Final arguments and judgment. Even where the Act contemplates a period within which judgment should follow the conclusion of arguments, the provision competes with everything else on the judge's board.
- Appeal. The Act does reach the appellate stage, and it reaches it in a way that catches people out. Section 13 gives sixty days from the date of the judgment or order to appeal, and Section 14 requires the Commercial Appellate Court and the Commercial Appellate Division to endeavour to dispose of an appeal within six months of filing. The filing window is a hard number; the disposal figure is an endeavour, and it is the endeavour rather than the window that has proved elastic. A commercial matter can still spend years upstairs.
Sixty days, not ninety. This is the deadline the Act shortened.
The instinct that appellate proceedings simply run on the ordinary limitation periods is the wrong instinct here, and it fails in the dangerous direction. An appellant reasoning from Article 116 of the Limitation Act would assume ninety days to appeal to a High Court from a decree. Section 13 of the Commercial Courts Act fixes sixty. A party who assumes the general law has a month of exposure they do not know about, and the loss is not theoretical: it is the appeal. Read Section 13 before you diarise anything, and note that its proviso limits appeals from orders to those enumerated in Order XLIII of the Code as amended by the Act and Section 37 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996.
The data problem
Case type coding for commercial suits varies by State, disposal data does not distinguish between a judgment on merits, a settlement and a withdrawal, and there is no national published series tracking time from institution to decree in commercial matters specifically. Anybody who tells you confidently that commercial courts have or have not delivered is working from impressions unless they have done the case-level work themselves.
What can be said is narrower and more defensible. The pleadings stage has demonstrably compressed, because the written statement deadline is enforced. The interlocutory stage has not obviously changed, and it is where a great deal of commercial litigation time is spent. Trials have not become materially shorter, because oral evidence practice has not changed much. And the appellate layer follows the pattern exactly: the part of Section 13 that binds a party, the sixty day window, is enforced, while the part of Section 14 that asks something of the court, disposal within six months, is framed as an endeavour and behaves like one.
The Act compressed the beginning of a commercial suit and left the middle and the end where it found them. Most of the delay is in the middle.
The Levers That Would Actually Change Speeds
If the diagnosis above is right, the remedies follow, and they are procedural rather than structural.
Take case management seriously as the default
The Act already provides for a hearing at which the entire schedule of the suit is fixed, including dates for evidence and arguments and limits on oral argument. Where this is done properly, timelines hold. Where it is treated as another listing, nothing changes. This lever exists and is simply underused.
Control the interlocutory stage
Applications, and appeals from orders on applications, are where commercial suits lose years. Limiting the occasions on which the record travels upward, and disposing of applications with the main matter where possible, would do more than any new provision.
Make costs real
A costs regime that awards a fraction of the actual cost of litigating does not deter delay. Costs that approximate what the successful party actually spent would change conduct within a year, and the statutory basis for it already exists.
Use summary judgment as it was designed
A large share of commercial disputes turn on documents about which there is no real controversy. The mechanism to dispose of those without a trial exists. Building a practice of using it requires both a bar willing to apply and a bench willing to decide on paper.
Add capacity where the docket justifies it
Designating a loaded court as a commercial court does not create judicial time. Where commercial filings are heavy, an exclusive court with staff and infrastructure produces gains that no procedural amendment can substitute for.
Publish the data
Time from institution to decree in commercial matters, disaggregated by court, is not systematically published. A reform whose central promise is speed should be measured on speed, and it is not.
The Research Problem the Act Created
There is a consequence of the Act that gets almost no attention and matters a great deal to practitioners. Because commercial courts at district level are usually designated existing courts, their orders form part of the ordinary district court record. There is no separate national repository of commercial court reasoning.
So the questions that come up constantly in commercial practice, how have commercial courts been applying the disclosure requirements, when have summary judgment applications succeeded, how strictly is the mediation exception being read, are answerable only by finding those orders in the general record. Many of them are not reported anywhere. Most are not headnoted. And they are exactly the material a litigator needs when advising whether a procedural application is worth making.
This is the layer CourtMesh was built for. One unified search runs across the Supreme Court, all twenty-five High Courts, the district judiciary and tribunals including NCLT, NCLAT, ITAT and CESTAT, drawn only from official government portals, with roughly 310 million records keyword-searchable and roughly 2 million carrying deeper semantic indexing, and with filters for court, case type and year. Finding how a provision of the amended Code has actually been applied at first instance is precisely the kind of question that the reported law will not answer and the trial record can.
Do not mistake the reported position for the working position
Appellate authority on the Commercial Courts Act tells you what the provisions mean. It does not tell you how a particular commercial court is actually running case management, how readily it grants extensions, or what it does with a summary judgment application. For litigation strategy, the second set of facts is often more useful than the first, and it lives entirely in unreported first-instance orders.
The fair conclusion is that the Commercial Courts Act was a well-designed intervention aimed at the right target, implemented in a way that changed obligations on parties without changing capacity on the bench. Its most successful provisions are the ones that operate automatically. Its least successful are the ones that require judicial time the system does not have spare. That is not an argument against the Act. It is an argument that the next reform should assume the constraint rather than legislating around it.
See how commercial courts are actually applying the Act
Appellate judgments tell you what the Commercial Courts Act means. First-instance orders tell you how it is being run, and almost none of them are reported. CourtMesh puts the Supreme Court, all twenty-five High Courts, the district judiciary and major tribunals behind one search, sourced only from official government portals, with filters for court, case type and year. Find the orders that shape strategy, and read them at source.
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