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

Large language models (LLMs) are moving into legal workflows, yet we lack a jurisdiction-grounded way to gauge their basic competence in thereof. We use India’s public legal examinations as a transparent proxy. Our multi-year benchmark assembles objective screens from top national and state exams and evaluates open and frontier LLMs under real world exam conditions. To probe beyond MCQs, we also include a lawyer-graded, paired-blinded study of long-form answers from the Supreme Court’s Advocate-on-Record exam. This is, to our knowledge, the first exam-grounded, India-specific yardstick for LLM court-readiness released with datasets and protocols. Our work shows that while frontier systems consistently clear historical cutoffs and often match or exceed recent top-scorer bands on objective exams, none surpasses the human topper on long-form reasoning. Grader notes converge on three reliability failure modes—procedural/format compliance, authority/citation discipline, and forum-appropriate voice/structure. These findings delineate where LLMs can assist (checks, cross-statute consistency, statute and precedent lookups) and where human leadership remains essential: forum-specific drafting and filing, procedural and relief strategy, reconciling authorities and exceptions, and ethical, accountable judgment.