ScratchBrief-InD

ScratchBrief-Ind is an MCP server paired with a Google Docs add-on that brings Indian legal research directly into the document you're drafting, instead of living in a separate browser tab.

Currently, researching case law and statutes in India means juggling IndianKanoon, IndiaCode, and (for those with institutional access) SCC Online or Manupatra in separate windows, then manually copying citations, quotes, and cross-references back into your draft. The kind of in-document tooling that makes this seamless — citation insertion, table of authorities generation, redlining against a prior draft, cross-reference consistency checks — does exist but it's locked behind paid LexisNexis/Westlaw-style plugins that most students, small practices, and individual researchers don't have access to.

What ScratchBrief does: it pulls case law from IndianKanoon and legislation from IndiaCode's, and exposes both through two surfaces sharing one backend — a Claude Desktop MCP server for open-ended research sessions, and a Google Docs sidebar for drafting-time lookups. From the sidebar you can search both sources, jump straight to the passage a result matched on, insert formatted citations, auto-detect and cross-check citations/Act references already in your document, generate a table of authorities, redline your draft against a saved answer or another Google Doc, and look up statutory definitions inline. A shared Google Sheet lets one person's research via claude sessions can be auto-shared to their whole team instead of everyone re-searching the same material.

TLDR: it recreates the useful parts of a premium legal-research plugin, for free, on top of open Indian legal data.

Search & retrieval

• Search across IndianKanoon (case law, Acts, Constitution, Law Commission reports, etc.) and IndiaCode (Central/State Acts, Rules, Notifications, Ordinances) from one sidebar as separate tabs
• Full document viewer with pagination ("Load more text"), jump-straight-to-matched-passage instead of always opening at the top, and an in-document find/search bar with next/prev navigation
• Citation graph browsing ("Cited by" / "Cites") for precedent chains without leaving the doc

AI-assisted drafting

• Relevance ranking of search results, and a "ready-to-draft digest" (most relevant paragraph, summarized) — both via the local Claude Code CLI rather than a paid API, if you only have access to Claude Basic the repo includes an Ollama workaround for the AI assist features
• Statutory definition lookup: select a term in your draft, find where the currently-open Act/Rules actually defines it

Citation tooling

• One-click "Insert citation" with a user-configurable citation format template
• "Find All" citation detection in the open document (AIR/SCC/SCC OnLine/neutral citations, case names, case numbers, Acts, Rules), with highlighting and click-to-locate
• Table of Authorities generation from detected citations
• Cross-reference consistency checker — flags "Section 7" / "Claim D"-style references that never appear as their own defining paragraph elsewhere in the doc

Compare / redline

• Word-level diff of your current selection (or cursor paragraph) against a saved answer or another Google Doc, to catch drift between drafts

Team collaboration

• "Saved answers" — research captured via the MCP tool (e.g. from a Claude Desktop session) is written to a shared Google Sheet via OAuth, so any teammate running the add-on can browse and use it and save it for later
• Folders for organizing and re-inserting saved search results

Feel free to fork and suggest improvements. Suggestions or pull requests for supporting additional citation format templates, or building out a Microsoft Word version of the add-in are welcome as well.