A Tamil Nadu practice can run six hundred kilometres long. The list that decides your morning should not depend on which city you happen to be in tonight.
The Madras High Court sits at Chennai with a bench at Madurai, and its jurisdiction runs over Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. Lawgger carries cause lists for both sittings on any date, live display boards through court hours, and CNR case tracking with a plain-words digest of every order.
The bench at Madurai exists so that the High Court reaches the southern districts of Tamil Nadu without requiring every litigant and every advocate to travel to Chennai. It has done that well enough that a substantial independent bar has grown around it.
The consequence for an advocate is a practice that can straddle both sittings — a set of matters at Chennai, a set at Madurai, and clients who do not much care which. And because the two sittings publish their lists independently, the ordinary failure is not forgetting a matter; it is not knowing that the other sitting listed one.
Lawgger holds a single watchlist across both. Save a matter once, by case number or CNR, and when either sitting lists it you are told which sitting, which court, which bench and which item — the same evening the list is published. You are never choosing which of the two to check tonight.
We deliberately do not publish a district-by-district allocation between the two sittings on this page. Allocation is a matter for the court's own notifications, and getting it approximately right in an article is worse than not stating it at all.
Madras is one of India's three oldest chartered High Courts, and it retains an original side alongside its appellate work. That is why the Chennai list carries suit-side matters that a High Court of ordinary appellate jurisdiction never sees, with their own case-type prefixes and their own interlocutory practice.
For a reader coming from another state, that is the thing that makes the Chennai list look unfamiliar. Writs, appeals, revisions, suits and applications share the same building and the same morning. The prefix on your case number, rather than the page number in the document, is what tells you where to look — and Lawgger applies that filter before you ever see the list.
The jurisdiction of this court extends to the Union Territory of Puducherry as well as to the State of Tamil Nadu. It is a fact regularly missed outside the state — Puducherry has no High Court of its own, and a matter arising there comes here.
For an advocate with clients in Puducherry, that means the lists, boards and tracking on this page are the ones that govern those matters too.
The next day's list is published by the court on the evening before. Everything else follows from that.
An advance list gives notice of what is expected on a future date, which helps preparation but promises nothing. The daily list is the operative document for one working day. A supplementary list carries what was added after the daily list went out, sometimes as late as the hearing morning. Read only the daily list and you will eventually be surprised.
Fastest for a matter you already know. Approximate as a way of being sure you have found every listing, because names are entered by hand and spellings vary between the plaint and the memo of parties.
Pulls out everything listed against you on a chosen date, across both sittings. See advocate-wise cause lists for how this is best used, and where it falls short.
Exact where a name is approximate. Once saved, the list finds you rather than the other way round — court number, bench and item number, pushed to your phone.
The cause list guide sets out each list type in detail, including what to do when your matter is not on the list at all.
The list is the plan for the day. The board is the day itself. Through court hours — typically 10:30 to 16:30 IST — it shows which item each court has reached, court number by court number.
That is what makes an item number useful. Item 52 is a whole morning away if the court is on item 11, and immediate if it is on item 49. Advocates who watch the board stop guessing and stop sitting in a courtroom for three hours waiting to be reached.
You will meet notation on the board — pass over, part heard, not reached — that carries real consequences for whether your matter survives the day. The display board guide explains each one.
Tamil Nadu is where the gap between the working language of a practice and the language of the reported judgment is at its sharpest. A district-court practice across the state runs substantially in Tamil — the client conference, the instructions, the plaint in a subordinate court — while the authority you will cite is reported in English.
Lawgger works in 10 Indian languages. Ask the question in Tamil, read the answer in Tamil, and the judgment it is pin-cited to remains the original English text you will actually put before the court. Nothing is translated away from the source; the language changes, the authority does not. See how Lawgger's legal AI works. The current list of supported languages is shown in the app.
The Supreme Court and all 25 High Courts, in full text, with 1.28 crore case-to-section links joining judgments to the provisions they turn on, and 18 lakh citation links joining them to each other. Every answer points to the page it came from.
And every authority carries a good-law verdict: still good law, or overruled, doubted, or displaced. Paste a draft into Authority Check and you get back a Table of Authorities with a verdict against each case in it — before filing, not after. More in legal research.
Cause lists are covered for around 700 district courts, across 722 districts in 35 states and union territories. A practice that runs from a subordinate court in a district headquarters up to the High Court sits in one place, and the same tracking, alerts and limitation clocks apply to every level of it.
Yes. The Madurai bench is covered on the same footing as the principal seat at Chennai: cause lists for any date, the live display board through court hours, and CNR case tracking with a plain-words digest of every order. One watchlist covers both sittings, so you do not choose between them.
The court publishes the daily list for a hearing day on the evening before it, and supplementary items can be added later that evening or on the hearing morning. No fixed clock time can be relied on. Lawgger shows the list as soon as the court publishes it and alerts you when a saved matter appears.
Yes, in the Lawgger app. The board runs live through court hours, roughly 10:30 to 16:30 IST, and shows which item each court is on. This website does not show live court data. In the app you can watch Chennai and Madurai at the same time, which matters if your matters are split between them.
Yes. The jurisdiction of the Madras High Court extends to the Union Territory of Puducherry as well as the State of Tamil Nadu. It is a point often missed outside the state, and it means a Puducherry matter travels to this court rather than to a High Court of its own.
Yes. Lawgger works in 10 Indian languages, Tamil among them. You can ask a research question in Tamil and read the answer in Tamil, while the judgment it is pin-cited to remains the original English text you will actually cite. Nothing is translated away from the source.
Yes. Save the CNR once and the matter is tracked for its whole life, at either sitting. Every order is digested into plain words such as interim stay granted, counter due in four weeks, and you are alerted when the matter is listed, adjourned or disposed. Case number and party name searches work too.
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Lawgger is software for advocates. It is not a law firm and gives no legal advice. Court information is shown as published in official court records.
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