Litigation Due Diligence Checklist for India

Checklist · Litigation Due Diligence

Updated for 2026 · Claw Editorial

Most litigation due diligence does not fail because the team could not find a case. It fails because nobody wrote down a complete list of what to search before the search began, so a court, a promoter, or a tribunal got left out without anyone noticing. Under a deal timeline, that gap does not surface until much later, often after money has changed hands. This page is a working checklist for litigation due diligence in India: what to define before you start, which entities and courts a proper search must cover, what to document for every finding, and which findings cannot wait for the final report.

01Why a checklist, not memory

Litigation due diligence in India is not one search. It is dozens of searches, across courts, tribunals, and regulators that do not share data with each other, run against a list of entities and individuals that is easy to get wrong. Relying on an associate to remember every forum and every name variant, deal after deal, is where gaps come from.

The same mistakes repeat

Across most litigation due diligence exercises, the same few things get missed: a subsidiary that was not on the original entity list, a promoter searched only by their most common name spelling, an NCLT check run once at the start and never repeated, or a district court that nobody thought to search because the company’s registered office is in a different state. None of these are exotic mistakes. They happen because there was no written list to check against.

Deal pressure makes it worse

Transactions, loan sanctions, and vendor sign-offs all run on a clock. When time is short, the first thing to get compressed is the breadth of the search, not the depth of any one search. A checklist protects against that specific failure: it forces the team to at least touch every forum and every entity on the list, even if some searches are quicker than others.

Litigation due diligence rarely fails because a search came back wrong. It fails because a court, a promoter, or an entity was never searched at all.

02What this checklist covers

This is a working checklist, meant to be kept open while a litigation due diligence exercise is running, not a background explanation of what litigation due diligence is. It covers what to search, where to search it, what to record, and what to escalate immediately.

For the broader concept of legal due diligence, of which litigation is one workstream among several, see what legal due diligence is. For the category-level question of what company litigation search means and how it is carried out, see the complete guide to company litigation search in India. And if you want the numbered, step-by-step process behind each item on this checklist, including exactly which portals to use, see how to do litigation due diligence on a company. This page stays focused on the checklist itself.

03Before you start

Four things need to be settled before the first search is run. Getting these wrong at the start means redoing work later.

• ☐ Confirm the transaction type and timeline. An M&A deal, a loan sanction, an IPO, and a vendor sign-off each carry a different risk tolerance and a different deadline. The checklist depth should match the stakes.
• ☐ Agree a materiality threshold. Decide, in writing, what counts as a matter worth reporting in detail versus one that only needs to appear in a summary schedule. Without this, either everything gets over-reported or small but real risks get skipped.
• ☐ Set the historical lookback period. Decide how far back the search needs to go. A newly incorporated company needs less history than one that has operated for decades or has been through a merger or rebrand.
• ☐ Name who signs off on the findings. A litigation search that nobody formally reviews and approves is not a completed due diligence exercise. Decide upfront who reads the report and who has authority to flag a deal-breaking finding.

04Checklist: entities and individuals to search

Get this list confirmed in writing by the target or counterparty before searching. It determines the quality of everything that follows, and a written confirmation creates accountability if something is later found to have been left off.

• ☐ The company itself, under its current registered name and any earlier name it has used, including before a merger, demerger, or rebrand.
• ☐ Direct and step-down subsidiaries.
• ☐ Associate companies and joint ventures in which the entity holds a significant stake.
• ☐ Group or promoter-linked entities, especially ones that share directors or have given cross-guarantees.
• ☐ All current directors and key managerial personnel, plus former directors if the lookback period covers their tenure.
• ☐ Promoters who are natural persons, searched separately from the company they control.
• ☐ Name variants for every entity and individual above, including common misspellings, abbreviations, and transliterations, since Indian court filings are not always consistent on spelling.

Company names and MCA-registered particulars are two different things to check, and confusing them is a common gap. See MCA search versus litigation search for why a clean Ministry of Corporate Affairs record does not tell you whether the same entity is fighting a court case.

05Checklist: courts and tribunals to cover

Do not assume a company’s litigation is limited to the state where it is registered. Search wherever it has operations, contracts, or assets.

• ☐ Supreme Court of India, for pending and recently decided matters, including appeals from lower courts.
• ☐ Every relevant High Court, meaning every state where the entity has a registered office, a factory, a major contract, or significant operations, not only the state of incorporation.
• ☐ District and civil courts in those same states, for civil suits, commercial disputes, and criminal complaints such as Section 138 cheque-dishonour cases under the Negotiable Instruments Act.
• ☐ NCLT and NCLAT, for insolvency petitions, oppression and mismanagement petitions, and winding-up proceedings. Run this search again, close to the deal date, since an insolvency application can be filed and admitted within days.
• ☐ Debt Recovery Tribunals (DRT), for recovery proceedings against the entity or personal guarantee invocations against its promoters.
• ☐ Consumer forums, including the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission and relevant state commissions, particularly for consumer-facing businesses where case volumes can run into the hundreds.
• ☐ Tax and regulatory tribunals, such as the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT) and GST appellate forums, for disputed tax demands, which are often the largest contingent liabilities found in Indian due diligence.
• ☐ Labour courts and industrial tribunals, for wage claims and industrial disputes, particularly for manufacturing, logistics, and services businesses.

06Checklist: company and regulatory records

Litigation search alone does not cover everything. Pair it with these records checks, which surface a different kind of risk.

• ☐ MCA21 portal, for company master data, director details, registered charges, and filing compliance. See MCA search versus litigation search if you are unsure why this is a separate check from court search.
• ☐ Disqualified director and struck-off company status on the MCA21 portal.
• ☐ IBBI (Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India) portal, for entities under active insolvency proceedings or liquidation.
• ☐ SEBI enforcement orders, for listed companies, market intermediaries, and their promoters or directors, covering debarment, penalty, and disgorgement orders.
• ☐ Sector regulator enforcement actions, where relevant, such as RBI for NBFCs and banks, IRDAI for insurers, or TRAI for telecom entities.
• ☐ EPFO and state labour department records, for provident fund defaults and pending labour proceedings.

07Checklist: documenting each finding

A list of case names is not a due diligence output. For every matter found, capture enough detail that someone who was not part of the search can act on it.

• ☐ Forum and case number, so the matter can be independently verified later.
• ☐ Parties involved, including whether the entity or an individual is claimant, defendant, or respondent.
• ☐ Nature of the claim and current stage of proceedings.
• ☐ Date of the last order, and a note on whether any recent order was adverse.
• ☐ Estimated financial exposure, where it can be reasonably quantified.
• ☐ A verifiable citation or link back to the source record, so the finding does not rest on the searcher’s word alone.
• ☐ The date the search was run and which forum it covered, logged for every search performed, including the ones that came back clean. This is what creates an audit trail if a question comes up later about whether a particular court was actually checked.

08Checklist: red flags that cannot wait for the final report

Most findings can go into the final report on schedule. A small number should be escalated to the deal team immediately, without waiting for the report to be finished.

• ☐ An active NCLT insolvency application, admitted or pending, against the entity.
• ☐ A passed decree or arbitral award that was not disclosed by the entity in its self-declaration.
• ☐ A SEBI debarment or penalty order against a key promoter or the entity itself.
• ☐ A personal guarantee invocation at a DRT against a promoter or director.
• ☐ A criminal prosecution of a director for an offence that could trigger a statutory disqualification, such as under Section 164 of the Companies Act, 2013.
• ☐ Any material gap between what the entity disclosed and what the search actually found. The gap itself is a finding, independent of how serious the underlying case turns out to be.

09Checklist: before you sign off

A litigation due diligence exercise is complete only when these final checks are done, not simply when every court has been searched once.

• ☐ Confirm the entity and individual list was signed off by the target, not just assembled internally.
• ☐ Confirm every forum on the checklist was actually searched, and that the log shows a search date for each, including forums that returned no results.
• ☐ Re-run the NCLT and DRT checks close to the deal closing date, since these are the two forums where a fresh filing can change the picture fastest.
• ☐ List every gap disclosure separately, so the deal team sees undisclosed matters distinctly from disclosed ones.
• ☐ Map each material finding to a recommended deal protection, such as a price adjustment, an indemnity, an escrow holdback, or a condition precedent, so the report is directly usable in negotiation rather than a plain list of cases.
• ☐ Get formal sign-off from the person named at the start of the exercise, so the checklist has a clear owner and a documented approval.

For the full narrative walkthrough of running each of these steps, including how to structure the final report for a deal team, see how to do litigation due diligence on a company.

10Where Claw fits

Claw is an all-in-one legaltech platform for Indian advocates, law firms, and corporate legal teams, combining AI-based case search, an AI legal assistant (Legal GPT), case management, and compliance automation across all Indian courts and tribunals.

The heaviest, most repetitive part of this checklist is the court and tribunal search step: running every entity and individual name across the Supreme Court, every relevant High Court, and, where a team wants it, tracking any matter that turns up going forward. Claw’s case search covers 30 crore judgements across all 25 High Courts (1980 to 2026) and the Supreme Court (1950 to 2026), with AI-based semantic search and name-tolerant matching that catches spelling and transliteration variants, the exact problem the entity checklist above is built to guard against. Results come back with verified, court-ready citations in under 5 seconds, so a finding can be logged with a checkable source rather than a note taken on faith. Once a matter is found, Claw’s case management tools track it across 8,200 plus courts, including tribunals and district courts, so it does not fall off anyone’s radar after the deal closes.

Claw does not replace the MCA21, IBBI, SEBI, or sector-regulator checks on this list, which still need to be run directly on those official portals. For a comparison of tools built specifically for the litigation due diligence job, including how they differ on court coverage and pricing, see the best litigation due diligence software in India.

11Sources and further reading

• Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA21 portal): mca.gov.in
• Supreme Court of India (official judgments and case status): sci.gov.in
• eCourts (district and High Court case status): ecourts.gov.in
• National Company Law Tribunal: nclt.gov.in
• Debt Recovery Tribunals: drt.gov.in
• Claw: clawlaw.in

This checklist is a general working reference, not legal advice. Every transaction has its own risk profile, and the scope and threshold for any real litigation due diligence exercise should be agreed with counsel before work begins.

12Frequently asked questions