Almost every remedy after a loss moves in one direction. You lose, and the next thing you look for is a higher court. Appeal goes up. Revision goes up. A writ goes up. A review goes back. It is addressed to the very court that decided against you, and where that judge is still sitting, it ordinarily lands in front of the same person. You are not asking a fresh mind to look at the dispute. You are asking the court that wrote the order to look at its own record again. Which immediately explains the thing people find hardest about this remedy — how narrow the grounds are. Section 114 and Order XLVII Rule 1 of the Code of Civil Procedure give three: new and important matter that could not have been produced despite due diligence, a mistake or error apparent on the face of the record, or any other sufficient reason. The third sounds like a door left open. It is read as narrowly as the other two. The Supreme Court drew the line that decides most of these in Parsion Devi v. Sumitri Devi (1997): an error which is not self evident and has to be detected by a process of reasoning can hardly be said to be an error apparent on the face of the record. There is, the Court said, a clear distinction between an erroneous decision and an apparent error — and a review cannot be allowed to be an appeal in disguise. Out of that falls a test worth more than anything else here, and it is free. Write the error in one sentence that quotes the order and points at the page of the record it contradicts. No argument. No because. If it comes out in one line, you may have something, and thirty days is already running from the date of the order. If the sentence keeps growing, you have your answer in an afternoon instead of after a filing. Where we stop: we state no court fee, no registry timeline and no success rate. We do not appear or argue. And most people who ask us about a review are told in the first reply that it is not the remedy they want.
What this guide covers
Start with the direction of travel, because almost everything people get wrong about this remedy follows from assuming it moves the way the others do.
When a case is lost, the instinct is to look upward. There is a court above this one, it has not seen the matter, and a fresh set of eyes is the natural thing to want. Appeal goes up. Revision goes up. A writ goes up to a High Court.
A review does not move at all. It is filed in the same court, in the same matter, before the same bench where that bench still exists. Nothing travels. The file is reopened where it already sits.
That single fact controls everything else on this page. A court is not going to reconsider its own decision because somebody has made the argument better the second time, and a remedy that allowed it would be a licence for every loser to have another go in front of the same judge. So the grounds had to be narrow, and they are.
People are surprised by this, and a few are dismayed by it, so it is better stated early than discovered late.
A review is addressed to the court that passed the order. Where the judge who passed it is still presiding over that court, the review ordinarily goes back to that judge. You are asking the person who wrote the order to read it again against the record.
That arrangement is not an accident of listing. It follows from what a review is: the court correcting its own record. If a different judge were to reconsider the merits, that would be an appeal, and appeals have their own forum and their own rules.
It also quietly explains the tone a review has to be written in, which is dealt with further down. You are not addressing a stranger who has no stake in the order. You are addressing its author.
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Set side by side at the start, because a good share of the enquiries we get are at the wrong door and do not know it.
The first door is appeal: a higher court, the whole dispute, the question being whether the decision below was right. The second is revision: also upward, but a narrower question about jurisdiction and material irregularity rather than the merits. The third is review: the same court, the same record, and only what is apparent on its face.
There is a fourth that is not really a door out of a loss at all, and it is the one most often mistaken for a review. A person who was never served and never appeared is not asking for reconsideration; they are saying the hearing happened without them. That is an application to set aside, with its own period.
The expensive mistake is not choosing the hardest door. It is choosing a door while a better one quietly closes. These periods run concurrently, and nothing about preparing one application pauses the clock on another.
Worth reading in its own words rather than in summary, because the words are doing a great deal of work.
On the civil side the power comes from section 114 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, and the grounds are set out in Order XLVII Rule 1. A person aggrieved may apply for a review on the discovery of new and important matter or evidence which, after the exercise of due diligence, was not within their knowledge or could not be produced at the time; or on account of some mistake or error apparent on the face of the record; or for any other sufficient reason.
Three phrases carry the weight. After the exercise of due diligence. Apparent on the face of the record. Sufficient reason. Each one has been narrowed by a long line of decisions, and none of them means what it sounds like it means on a first reading.
The clearest statement of the standard, and the one worth memorising if nothing else here is, came from the Supreme Court in Parsion Devi v. Sumitri Devi in 1997.
An error which is not self evident and has to be detected by a process of reasoning, the Court said, can hardly be said to be an error apparent on the face of the record. Review proceedings are to be strictly confined to the ambit and scope of the rule.
Read that twice, because the second half of it is the operative part. The question is not whether the error is real. The question is whether it is visible without reasoning.
An error can be perfectly genuine, demonstrable, and fatal to the outcome, and still not be reviewable — because demonstrating it takes argument.
The same judgment drew the distinction in one line: there is a clear distinction between an erroneous decision and an error apparent on the face of the record.
Most litigants hear that and assume it is a lawyer’s nicety. It is the opposite. It is the practical boundary that decides whether a petition is read or dismissed, and it is a boundary of kind rather than of degree.
A decision can be wrong in every particular, reached on a misreading of the evidence, and still be an erroneous decision rather than an apparent error, because establishing the wrongness requires going back through the material. Conversely a trivial error — the order records that a document was not filed when the court’s own index shows it was — may be apparent, because nothing has to be established at all.
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Out of all of that falls something you can do yourself, today, at no cost, and it is the part of this page worth acting on.
Take the order and the record. Try to write the error in a single sentence that quotes the order and identifies the page it contradicts. Two references, no argument, and specifically no word because.
If it comes out in one line, you may have something. If you find yourself writing a second sentence to explain why the first one matters, you have found out what the court would have told you in three months, and it has cost you an afternoon.
We use this test on every enquiry, and we ask the person to write the sentence themselves rather than writing it for them. The exercise is diagnostic precisely because it is hard to fake.
Knowing all this, a great many reviews are still filed that have no chance, and it is worth understanding why rather than being dismissive about it.
Partly cost. An appeal looks expensive and slow; a review looks like a short letter to a court that already has the file. Partly hope, which deserves no contempt. And partly bad advice from people who are not being dishonest, only imprecise — a relative who heard the word, a well-meaning acquaintance who tried it once.
There is also a structural reason. The person who lost has just read the judgment more carefully than anybody else ever will, and has found something in it that is genuinely unsatisfactory. The discovery is real. The remedy it points to is usually not this one.
Put at its bluntest: the commonest reason for filing a review is the one reason a review does not exist to serve.
Believing a decision is wrong, even being correct in believing it, is not a ground. The entire architecture of appeal exists for that, and it exists in a higher court precisely because a court is not well placed to re-decide what it has just decided.
If the honest description of your grievance is that the judge got it wrong, you are describing an appeal. Filing a review instead does not improve your position; it consumes part of the period in which you could have appealed.
Where an appeal is what you want, our appeal drafting work is the right page and the period is almost certainly already running.
There is a settled expression for a review that argues the merits again, and once you know it you will see it in almost every dismissal order.
A review, the Supreme Court said in Parsion Devi, has a limited purpose and cannot be allowed to be an appeal in disguise. The phrase is older than that judgment — it was quoted there from an earlier decision — and it has been applied steadily ever since.
It is worth sitting with the word disguise for a moment. The objection is not that the argument is bad. The objection is that the petition is pretending to be one thing while doing another, and courts react to that more sharply than to a weak point honestly made.
Which is also why a candid review — one that says plainly what the apparent error is and does not pad it with merits — reads so differently from the usual run of them, even before anybody considers whether the point is good.
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The rule gives three, and treating them as three distinct doors rather than one general invitation is the first discipline of drafting a review.
In practice they are used very unevenly. The second — mistake or error apparent on the face of the record — carries almost all of the successful petitions. The first is available but rarely satisfied. The third is invoked constantly and succeeds almost never, for a reason set out a few sections below.
So the honest ranking is this. If your point is an apparent error, say so and say nothing else. If it is genuinely new matter that could not have been produced, that is a real ground and it has its own requirements. If you are reaching for sufficient reason, pause and ask what you are actually complaining about.
The first ground sounds the most generous of the three and is the most frequently misread.
It permits review on the discovery of new and important matter or evidence. Both adjectives are load-bearing. New, in the sense of newly discovered rather than newly thought of. Important, in the sense of capable of affecting the result rather than merely adding to the file.
And then the qualification that does most of the work, which is dealt with separately because it deserves its own section.
After the exercise of due diligence. Four words in the rule, and they close the first ground against most of the people who try it.
The requirement is not that the material is new to you now. It is that it was not within your knowledge, or could not have been produced, despite reasonable efforts made at the time. Material that was sitting in your own file, or in a public register anybody could have searched, or with a witness you knew about, fails the test regardless of whether you actually looked.
And here is the trap people walk into. Attaching the material to the review is how the court finds out it existed. A petition that annexes a document to prove the point often proves instead that the document was available all along, and the annexure becomes the reason for dismissal.
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Collected plainly, because each of these arrives regularly and each is refused for the same reason.
A witness who was available and was not examined. A document that was in your possession and was not filed. A record you could have obtained from a public office and did not ask for. An expert opinion obtained after the judgment. A better version of a point already argued. And a new legal authority found afterwards, which is not evidence at all.
The witness case is worth a sentence of its own because it carries the most emotional weight. A person who was unwilling to depose during the trial and is willing now has not become newly discovered evidence. What changed is the witness, not the state of your knowledge.
Where the material genuinely could not have been reached — a register that was sealed, a record destroyed and later reconstructed, a fact concealed by the other side and discovered afterwards — the ground is real, and it should be pleaded with the diligence story spelt out rather than asserted.
The second ground is where the work is, and it is the one this page has been circling since the first paragraph.
Mistake or error apparent on the face of the record. Not an error in the decision. An error apparent on the face of the record, meaning the record of the court — the pleadings, the orders, the index, the documents filed, the evidence recorded.
The best way to hold on to it: the error has to be between the order and the record, not between the order and the truth. A court that reached a wrong conclusion from the material before it has decided erroneously. A court whose order contradicts the material before it has made an apparent error.
That distinction is why the one-sentence test works. A contradiction between two documents can be stated by pointing. A wrong conclusion cannot.
Illustrations rather than a list, because the category is defined by its shape rather than its contents.
An order recording that a document was not filed, where the court’s own index shows it was. A figure in the operative portion that does not match the figure in the body. A finding recorded against a party who was never arrayed in that matter. A date on which the whole reasoning turns, carried forward incorrectly from the pleadings. A statutory provision applied in a form it did not have on the relevant date.
What all of these share is that establishing them requires nothing but putting two pages next to each other. Nobody has to be persuaded. The reader sees it.
Notice how little drama there is in that list. The reviewable errors are mostly small, mechanical and unglamorous. The dramatic complaints — the evidence was misread, the witness was unreliable, the law was misapplied in substance — are appeals.
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Which brings us to the third ground, the one that reads like an open invitation and functions as a closed door.
Any other sufficient reason. On its face those words could carry anything. In practice they have been read, for well over a century, as meaning a reason sufficient on grounds at least analogous to those specified immediately before — that is, of the same character as new matter or an apparent error.
So the third ground does not widen the first two. It catches cases of the same kind that the first two happen not to describe.
It is worth understanding the logic, because once you see it you will stop reaching for this ground and your petitions will be better for it.
If sufficient reason meant any good reason, the first two grounds would be redundant. A rule does not set out two specific grounds and then add a third that swallows them. So the courts read the third as taking its colour from the first two, and the structure of the rule survives.
The practical consequence for drafting is immediate. A petition that leads with sufficient reason is announcing that it does not fit either of the real grounds, and experienced readers of these petitions know it. If you have an apparent error, plead the apparent error.
A small point of craft that makes a disproportionate difference, and it is free.
Say which ground you are on, in terms, early in the petition. Not all three as alternatives. One, named, with the facts that satisfy it.
Pleading all three is the clearest possible signal that none of them has been thought about, and it invites the reader to test the petition against the hardest of them. A petition that says this is an error apparent on the face of the record, and here it is, has asked to be judged on a single question, which is the only question it can win.
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Everything so far has been civil. The criminal position is different in kind, and it surprises almost everybody who learns it.
A criminal court that has signed its judgment has, with narrow exceptions, no power to alter or review it at all. The provision is section 403 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, which carried forward section 362 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 in substance.
Save as otherwise provided by the Sanhita or by any other law in force, no court, when it has signed its judgment or final order disposing of a case, shall alter or review the same — except to correct a clerical or arithmetical error.
That is the whole of the power. It is not a narrow version of the civil review. It is a different and much smaller thing.
So what can actually be done, after a criminal judgment is signed, by the court that signed it.
A misspelt name can be put right. A figure added up wrongly in a compensation or fine calculation can be corrected. A section number mistyped in the operative part can be fixed where it is plainly a slip.
What cannot be done is anything that touches the decision. Not a reconsideration of the finding. Not a revisiting of the sentence. Not the admission of material that was not before the court. The Supreme Court has repeated this often enough that the position is not seriously arguable.
Which means a petition filed in a criminal matter asking the trial or appellate court to look again at what it decided is not a weak application. It is an application the court has no power to entertain, and the time spent on it is taken from remedies that do exist.
This section exists because the question arrives constantly and deserves a straight answer rather than a shrug.
What remains is appeal, where the period is open or can be explained, and revision in the cases that fit it. Our criminal appeal page sets out what an appeal actually examines and why the certified record matters more than anything a family can add to it; our criminal revision page covers the narrower route.
Where the complaint is about the initiation of the proceedings rather than their outcome, quashing is a different jurisdiction with different requirements. And where liberty is the immediate question, bail and interim bail are separate applications that do not wait on any of this.
None of those is a review, and a family that has been told to try a review first should know that the clock on all of them has been running since the judgment was pronounced.
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The two words are close enough in sound that they get used interchangeably in conversation, and the difference is not small.
A revision goes to a higher court. It is concerned with whether the court below exercised a jurisdiction it did not have, failed to exercise one it did, or acted with material irregularity in the exercise of it. It is not an examination of the merits, but it is an examination by somebody else.
A review stays where it is and looks only at the face of the record. So the question that separates them is not how serious your complaint is. It is whether your complaint is about what the court did or about what its order says.
A rough sorting rule. Complaint about the court’s authority or procedure, look upward at revision. Complaint that the order contradicts the record, stay where you are. Complaint about the conclusion, that is appeal.
The comparison people most need is the one between review and appeal, and it comes down to a single question: what is being asked.
An appeal asks whether the decision was right. That is a question about the merits, put to a court that has not decided them, and the appellate court can re-examine the material and substitute its own conclusion.
A review asks whether there is something on the face of the record that cannot stand with the order. That is not a question about the merits at all, and the court answering it is the one that wrote the order.
Which is why the two cannot be ranked by strength. They are not a stronger and a weaker version of one application. They put different questions, and your facts answer which question is available — not which filing looks cheaper.
Put in a table because this is the one part of the page people come back to.
| Review | Revision | Appeal | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goes to | Same court | Higher court | Higher court |
| Question asked | Does the order contradict the record? | Was there a jurisdictional or procedural error below? | Was the decision right? |
| Merits reopened | No | Not as such | Yes |
| New material | Only if it could not have been produced | No | Limited, on leave |
| Criminal side | Nearly closed — clerical or arithmetical only | Available | Available |
The row that decides most cases is the second. Write down the question you actually want asked, in your own words, and the row it matches is the application you should be preparing.
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We have said this twice already and it is going to be said once more, because it is the costliest error available on this subject and it is entirely avoidable.
Periods for these remedies run from the same event and run alongside each other. Nothing about filing or preparing one of them suspends another. There is no sequence in which you try the cheap one and keep the expensive one in reserve.
So the decision has to be made once, early, on the facts. Not by trying the narrow remedy to see what happens. A review that takes six weeks to prepare and is dismissed in a line has not cost you a fee. It has cost you six weeks of an appeal period that nobody will restore.
If the position is genuinely unclear, that is a conversation to have with your advocate in the first week after the order, not in the fifth.
One more piece of the map, because the Supreme Court’s power sits on a different footing and people reason from it wrongly.
Article 137 of the Constitution gives the Supreme Court power to review any judgment pronounced or order made by it, subject to the provisions of any law made by Parliament and to rules made under Article 145. The procedure is in Order XLVII of the Supreme Court Rules, 2013 — thirty days under Rule 2, and under Rule 3 disposal by circulation without oral arguments unless the Court orders otherwise.
In death sentence matters that last position is different: following Mohd. Arif v. Registrar, Supreme Court of India (2014), review petitions in such cases are heard in open court with oral argument.
The point to take from this is a negative one. That power belongs to the Supreme Court because the Constitution gives it. It does not travel downward, and the existence of a Supreme Court review tells you nothing about what a trial court or a High Court may do with a signed criminal judgment.
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The period is short, and it is shorter in practice than it reads, for a reason set out two sections below.
For a review by a court other than the Supreme Court, Article 124 of the Schedule to the Limitation Act, 1963 gives thirty days, running from the date of the decree or order. In the Supreme Court, Order XLVII Rule 2 of its Rules gives the same thirty days from the date of the judgment or order sought to be reviewed.
Thirty days is not a long time to decide whether a remedy fits, obtain a certified copy, and have a petition drafted. Which is why the diagnostic test on this page is designed to be run in an afternoon rather than over a fortnight.
This is the sentence that costs people the remedy, so it is set out on its own.
The period runs from the date of the decree or order. Not from the date you received a copy. Not from the date you were told the result. Not from the date you read the judgment properly and found the problem.
So the day the order is passed, the clock is already running, whether or not anybody has told you anything. A litigant who learns the outcome a week later and gets a copy a fortnight after that has spent most of the period before reading the first line.
There are provisions elsewhere in the Limitation Act that deal with time taken in obtaining copies, and how they apply is a question for your advocate on your dates. What nobody should do is assume the clock starts conveniently.
Which leads to the practical bottleneck on every review, and it is not legal at all.
A review is filed against an order, and the order has to be before the court as a certified copy. Certified copies are issued by the registry of the court that passed the order, on an application, at the registry’s own pace. That pace varies from building to building in ways no page can usefully predict.
Meanwhile the thirty days is indifferent to the registry. It runs.
So the sequence that works is counter-intuitive. Apply for the copy before you have decided whether to file. The application costs little, the copy is useful whatever you decide, and the alternative is deciding to file on day twenty with nothing to file against.
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Stated as an instruction because it is the one piece of this page that should be acted on before the page is finished.
If an order has gone against you within the last month and you are reading this to find out whether a review is possible, stop at the end of this section and apply for the certified copy. Then come back.
The reason is simple. Every other question on this page can be answered later. That one gets slower the longer it waits, and it is the only step whose timing is outside your control.
Where obtaining the copy is itself the obstacle — a registry that cannot locate the file, a matter transferred, an order that was never drawn up — our certified true copy work deals with that separately, and it is often a faster conversation than people expect.
Yes, there is a provision for excusing delay. No, it should not form part of anybody’s strategy.
Where a filing is late, an application explaining the delay with sufficient cause can accompany it, and courts do allow such applications on good facts. Illness, a copy genuinely withheld, a record that could not be traced — these are real reasons and they are treated as real.
But consider the position you are asking the court to occupy. You are asking it to excuse lateness and then to reconsider its own order on a narrow ground. Two indulgences, in sequence, from the author of the order. Arriving on time removes the first of them entirely.
A delay application is a repair, not a route. Treat it the way you would treat any other repair: available if needed, not planned for.
Mechanically, where does the petition go.
To the court that passed the order, in the same matter, under the same number, with the review given its own registration as an application in that matter. It is not a fresh case and it does not begin a new file; it reopens one.
Within that court, it is placed before the judge who passed the order where that judge is available. The rule is not merely administrative convenience — a review is the court correcting its own record, and the court in that sense means the bench that made it.
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Judges retire, are elevated, are transferred, and take long leave, so this situation is ordinary rather than exceptional.
Where the judge who passed the order is no longer available, the review is heard by the successor presiding over that court. The remedy does not disappear because the author of the order has moved on.
It does, in practice, change the reading. A successor has no memory of the hearing and no investment in the reasoning, and encounters the order purely as a document alongside the record. For a petition resting on a genuine contradiction between the two, that is not a disadvantage.
It cuts the other way for a petition that is really an appeal. A successor is, if anything, quicker to see the mismatch between what the rule allows and what the petition is asking for.
Expectations here are usually wrong, and the correction is worth making before anybody imagines a day in court.
A review is an application within an existing matter. It is listed, it may be heard briefly, and where the court sees nothing apparent on the face of the record it is dismissed in a short order that does not engage with the merits at all — because engaging with the merits is precisely what the court is declining to do.
That brevity is often read by the losing party as the court not having read the petition. Usually the opposite is true: the petition was read, the question asked was whether anything on the record was contradicted, and the answer was no.
In the Supreme Court this is explicit, and it is worth knowing because it shapes what a petition there has to do.
Order XLVII Rule 3 of the Supreme Court Rules, 2013 provides that review petitions are disposed of by circulation without any oral arguments, unless the Court otherwise orders. The judges read the papers in chambers; nobody addresses them.
Which has a direct drafting consequence. Where there will be no oral hearing, the petition is the entire submission. Nothing can be explained afterwards, no question can be answered, and anything the reader does not find on the page does not exist.
The exception, following Mohd. Arif (2014), is review in death sentence matters, which are heard in open court. That exception exists because of what is at stake rather than because the ordinary rule is thought unsatisfactory.
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Most people assume the difficulty of a review petition is finding the ground. The real difficulty is resisting everything else.
A good review is short. It identifies the order, states the ground, states the error in a sentence, points at the annexure where the contradiction can be seen, and asks for the order to be reviewed. That can be done in two or three pages.
The temptation, particularly for a litigant who has just read an unsatisfactory judgment closely, is to include the whole case. Everything that was argued and not accepted. The unfairness of the other side. The history since 2019. All of it feels relevant, and none of it belongs.
The discipline is this: every sentence that is not about the apparent error is a sentence arguing the appeal you are not filing. Cutting them is not a stylistic choice. It is the difference between a review and an appeal in disguise.
The contents, kept deliberately minimal.
The particulars of the order under review and its date. The ground, named. The error, stated once, with the reference to the order and the reference to the record. The prayer. A statement on limitation if anything about the dates needs addressing. And the supporting affidavit.
Not: a restatement of the pleadings. Not: a history of the dispute. Not: the arguments advanced at the hearing. Not: the conduct of the opposite party, unless it is itself the apparent error.
A technique worth more than anything else in the drafting, and it is simple enough to describe in a paragraph.
Do not write that the record shows the document was filed. Annex the page of the record that shows it, mark the line, and write that the order at paragraph such-and-such records the document as not filed, while annexure so-and-so at page so-and-so is the court’s own index recording its filing.
The difference is between asserting and exhibiting. A description of the record asks the reader to accept a characterisation. An extract with a marked line asks the reader to look. A review lives or dies on whether the reader can look, so make looking take one movement.
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Which makes the annexure set the substantive part of a review rather than its appendix.
Paginate it. Index it. Keep it to the pages that matter rather than filing the whole trial record. Mark the specific lines, and make sure the mark is legible on a photocopy, because a photocopy is what will be read.
A review with four pages of annexure, every one of them necessary and every relevant line marked, is a stronger document than one with four hundred pages and nothing marked. The second is a common filing and it quietly asks the reader to do the petitioner’s work.
Where the relevant pages are in a language the forum does not take, that has to be handled before filing rather than after, and our legal translation and certified translation work exists for exactly that step.
A review is supported by an affidavit, and it is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a formality attached at the end.
Its function is to put the factual assertions in the petition on oath — what the record contains, when the order was received, when the copy was applied for, and where new matter is pleaded, the diligence story.
On the first ground especially, the affidavit carries the ground. A claim that material could not have been produced despite due diligence is a statement of fact about what you did and when, and it belongs on oath with dates rather than as an adjective in the petition.
Where attestation is the practical question, our notary attestation and notary affidavit work covers the mechanics, and online affidavit drafting covers the simpler shapes.
This is the only remedy where you are writing to the author of the thing you say is wrong, and that changes how it should read.
Not obsequious — nobody is asking for that, and it reads badly. But a review written in the register of grievance, implying carelessness or worse, is asking a judge to accept a criticism before examining a record. The petition that works does the opposite: it is flat, specific, and almost dull.
The ideal review reads like an errata note rather than a complaint. Here is what the order says. Here is what the record says. These cannot both stand. That is the whole document, and its lack of heat is what makes it readable.
Collected because each of these appears regularly and each actively damages the petition it appears in.
Suggesting the court did not read the file. Comparing the order to a decision in some other case on similar facts. Attaching letters of support or character material. Explaining the hardship the order causes, which is real and is not a ground. Setting out what was argued at the hearing. And reaching for sufficient reason because the apparent error is thin.
The hardship point deserves a line of its own, because refusing it feels harsh. A review is not a mechanism for relief from consequences. It is a mechanism for correcting the record. Where the consequences are the problem, the remedies are elsewhere — and where a decree is correct but unperformed, that is execution rather than anything on this page.
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A rule of thumb that works well enough to be worth printing, with the usual caveat that rules of thumb are not law.
If the review petition is running past five or six pages of substance, something has gone wrong. Either the error is not apparent and is being argued, or several complaints are being bundled in the hope that one lands.
Use the length as a self-check rather than as a target. When a draft keeps growing, the honest question is not how to tighten it but whether the point was ever apparent, and that question is cheaper to ask of a draft than of a dismissal order.
The last structural point, and it is the reason not to treat the first attempt as a trial run.
Once a review has been considered and disposed of, there is no further review of the same order. The jurisdiction is exhausted. An attempt to bring the same complaint again under a different label is dealt with as the abuse it is, and it does not improve anybody’s position.
So a review filed casually, on a thin point, to see what happens, does not merely fail. It uses up the one opportunity, and it does so while the periods for the remedies that might have worked continue to run.
Which is the whole argument for the afternoon of checking. One attempt, a short period, concurrent clocks, and a test you can apply yourself for nothing. There is no part of this subject where care is better rewarded.
People who write to us about a review are almost always in one of three states, and the three want completely different answers.
The first have just read an order and found a line in it that is wrong on its face — a date that contradicts the annexure, a figure carried forward with a digit missing, a finding recorded against a party who was never before that court. These are rare, and they are the only ones for whom this remedy was built.
The second have read an order carefully and disagree with its reasoning. They are often right that the reasoning is weak. That is not what we can help with here, and saying so in the first reply saves everybody a month.
The third have run out of time for an appeal and have been told, usually by somebody meaning well, that a review is still open. The thirty days for a review ran from the same date, so in most cases it is not. We check before saying anything else.
Four things, in this order, and the first two usually decide it.
The date on the order, against today. Whether a certified copy exists, or at least has been applied for. What the alleged error is, described in one sentence by the person asking rather than in a narrative. And whether an appeal, a revision or a correction application is the thing actually wanted.
The one-sentence requirement is not a formality. If the error cannot be put in a sentence without reference to arguments made at the hearing, that is the clearest early signal that it is not an error apparent on the face of the record, and it arrives before anybody has spent money.
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It is worth printing the uncomfortable thing plainly, because a page that only describes the remedy is selling something.
Most people who ask us about a review are not describing an error apparent on the face of the record. They are describing a decision they believe is wrong, and in a good number of cases they are describing it persuasively. We say so, and we say it in the first exchange rather than after an engagement.
Being the firm that says this remedy does not fit is a better position than being the firm that drafted a petition proving it. A dismissed review is not a neutral event: the weeks are gone, and the order sits on the record of the matter.
Where an appeal is still open, we say that instead, and our appeal drafting work is the better door. Where the grievance is with an order of a subordinate court and the complaint is about jurisdiction or procedure rather than conclusion, revision may be the shape of it.
Where the thing does fit, what we assemble is deliberately small.
The certified copy obtained or chased, the extract located and marked, the petition drafted to point rather than to argue, the supporting affidavit, the annexure set paginated so that the marked line can be reached in one movement, and a note on limitation if any part of the clock needs explaining.
That is the whole of it. A review that needs more than that is being padded, and padding is the most reliable way to tell a reader that the self-evident error is not self-evident.
Three things, and we decline them even when the person asking is certain.
A review that restates the case. A review that attaches material which existed and was available at the hearing and was simply not filed — the due diligence words in the provision exist precisely to close that door, and attaching the material anyway only demonstrates that it was available. And a review whose real complaint is that a different judge would have decided differently.
We also will not draft a review in a criminal matter dressed as something else. Where the court has signed its judgment, the only correction available to it is a clerical or arithmetical one, and a petition pretending otherwise wastes the limited time that a criminal appeal or a criminal revision still has left.
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A review is a court filing, and the line between what we do and what an advocate does sits in the same place it sits on every court matter.
We prepare papers, obtain copies, organise annexures and keep the file in order. Appearing, arguing, responding to a query from the bench, deciding whether to press the matter or withdraw it — those are not documentation acts and we do not pretend they are.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it. Where you do not yet have one, our online legal consultation is a place to start the conversation rather than a substitute for engaging somebody properly.
Stated flatly, because on a remedy with this low a success rate, confidence is the dishonest thing to sell.
That a review will succeed, or has a good chance. That an error we can see is an error the court will accept as apparent on its face — that judgment is the court’s and nobody else makes it. That a delay will be condoned. That a particular judge will take a particular view. Or that any period we state covers anything other than our own side of the work.
And one specific thing we will never say. That filing a review protects a position while you think about an appeal. It does not. Where both are available the clocks run together, and a month spent on a review is a month taken off whatever else was open.
Whatever happens to the petition, keep the bundle.
The certified copy, the review as filed, the order disposing of it, and the dates. If the matter travels further — to an appeal where one survives, or to a higher forum — that bundle is the first thing anybody will ask for, and reassembling it eighteen months later from memory and loose photocopies is a worse afternoon than it sounds.
Our legal file management work exists for people who would rather not keep it themselves, though a single labelled folder does the job perfectly well.
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A review is narrow enough that the useful part of this page may turn out to be the alternatives, so they are collected here rather than scattered.
| What is actually wrong | Where it belongs |
|---|---|
| The conclusion is wrong on the merits | Appeal, while the period is open |
| The court below acted without jurisdiction or ignored procedure | Revision |
| A name, figure or date is mistyped in the order | Correction of a clerical or arithmetical error |
| The decree is correct but nothing has been paid or handed over | Execution |
| You were never heard at all | An application to set aside, not a review |
The last line of that table is the one most often got wrong. A person who was never served and learns of the matter afterwards is not asking the court to reconsider; they are saying the hearing happened without them, which is a different application with its own period.
A surprising share of review enquiries are corrections wearing the wrong name.
A spelling in a party name. A survey number with a transposed digit. A figure in the operative portion that does not match the figure in the body. These do not need the review machinery at all, and courts deal with them as what they are.
Worth testing before anything else. If granting what you want would leave the decision exactly as it stands and only make the paper match it, you are asking for a correction. If granting it would change who won, you are asking for a review, and the bar moves.
Where an appeal lies and the period has not run, the question of a review barely arises.
An appeal reconsiders; a review does not. A forum that can look at the whole dispute again is a better place to take a disagreement than one that may only correct what is visible without argument, and the two are not alternatives of equal weight.
There is also an ordering point that costs people months. Time spent preparing and filing a review does not pause an appeal period. If both are genuinely available, the appeal is decided on first, not second.
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Here is the number. We print it rather than discuss it.
₹5,500, with our side of the work generally running 3 – 7 days.
That buys the reading of the order against the record, the certified copy obtained or chased, the petition drafted, the supporting affidavit, the annexure set assembled and paginated, and a limitation note where the dates need one.
Stated separately so it is not read past.
Outside it: every court fee and copy charge, which are the court’s and are paid to the court; your advocate’s engagement, on the terms described above; translation where the record is in a language the forum does not take, which our legal translation work handles separately; and anything that follows the review — an appeal, a revision, or a fresh matter.
On the span: three to seven days describes the drafting and assembly. It describes nothing on the court’s side, and nothing about how long a copy application takes in a particular registry, which varies more than any figure we could honestly print.
If one thing on this page is worth acting on today, it is not the drafting.
Sit down with the order and the record side by side, and try to write the error in a single sentence that quotes the order and points at the page it contradicts. Not an argument. A sentence with two references in it.
If it comes out in one line, you may have something, and the thirty days matters from this moment. If it takes three attempts and keeps growing a “because” clause, the answer has arrived and it has cost you an afternoon instead of a filing.
Everything above reduces to a single proposition, and it is the one courts have been repeating for sixty years.
A review is not a rehearing. It does not ask whether the decision was right. It asks whether there is something on the face of the record that cannot be reconciled with the order — something you can point at rather than explain.
If you have to persuade the court that the error is an error, the error is not apparent, and the petition will be read as the appeal it is.
Review and appeal are not alternatives you choose between at leisure. The appeal period keeps running while a review is being prepared, and the appellate route has its own Order and its own Article of the Schedule. Set out at appeal drafting.
On the criminal side the upward narrow remedy is revision, and it carries a trap of its own. Section 440(3) of the Sanhita makes a Sessions Judge decision on a revision application final against the applicant, so the High Court closes for that order. Worked through on criminal revision.
A review goes back to the same court that decided against you, and it may only correct what is visible on the face of the record — a mistake or error apparent, new and important matter that could not have been produced despite due diligence, or any other sufficient reason read as narrowly as those two. It is not a rehearing, it is not an appeal, and a petition that argues the merits again is read as an appeal in disguise and dismissed. So we start with the cheapest test there is: can the error be stated in one sentence that quotes the order and points at the page it contradicts? If it can, we obtain or chase the certified copy, draft a petition that points rather than argues, prepare the supporting affidavit, paginate the annexures so the marked line is reachable in one movement, and note the limitation position. If it cannot, we say so in the first reply and tell you which remedy the grievance actually belongs to. What we do not do: argue or appear, draft a review that restates the case, attach material that was available at the hearing, or tell anybody that a review has a good chance.
The provisions and the one judgment this page leans on. For civil matters, section 114 and Order XLVII Rule 1 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, which set out the three grounds; Article 124 of the Schedule to the Limitation Act, 1963, which fixes thirty days from the date of the decree or order for a review by a court other than the Supreme Court. For the Supreme Court’s own power, Article 137 of the Constitution read with Order XLVII of the Supreme Court Rules, 2013. On the criminal side, section 403 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 — the successor to section 362 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 — under which a court that has signed its judgment may not alter or review it except to correct a clerical or arithmetical error. And one judgment: Parsion Devi v. Sumitri Devi (1997), in which the Supreme Court held that an error which is not self-evident and has to be detected by a process of reasoning can hardly be said to be an error apparent on the face of the record, drew the distinction between an erroneous decision and an apparent error, and said that a review cannot be allowed to be an appeal in disguise.
What we have deliberately left out. No court fee, no copy charge, no registry timeline, no forum-specific practice note, and no success figure. Procedure on the civil side is worked out through High Court rules and local practice that differ from State to State, and a number carried off a general page into a particular registry is how a limitation point gets lost.
Where the rest of this properly sits. Your advocate, from the moment anything is to be argued. The registry of the court that passed the order, for copies, fees and the form the filing must take. Our appeal drafting and revision petition pages for the two remedies most often confused with this one; our execution petition page where the decree is sound and only unperformed; our caveat petition page for the other side of the same moment, when you expect somebody else to move first; and our certified true copy work where the copy itself is the obstacle.
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