Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.
- Felix Frankfurter

Philosophers of the world have always impressed upon men to stay away from litigation. Thus, Abraham Lincoln has said that a worse man can scarcely be found who indulges in litigation. However, since disputes are bound to happen from time to time, the civilized way to resolve them is to take the help of law. Litigation is the process of appeal for settlement of a dispute, and all the ensuing processes involved therein. A litigation is instituted by an interested party (called the plaintiff or litigant) to enforce a right, impose a penalty, award damages, impose an injunction to prevent an act or compel an act, or to obtain a declaration to prevent further legal disputes. Litigation is a compulsory process of legal resolution and is the contrivance of jurisprudence.

For a litigation to be instituted, proper procedure must be followed. Litigations, or lawsuits, also go through certain stages, like the pleading stage (where the case is ‘heard’), the pre-trial stage (involving discovery where evidence and statements are recorded), the trial and judgment stage, the appeal stage (where the judgment is appealed against by any aggrieved party), and finally the enforcement stage. While some lawsuits get resolved without spending much time or resources, some drag on for ages bringing financial loss and undue anxiety to all. In some countries the relevant infrastructure is fine tuned, enabling prompt dispute resolutions; in some countries the systemic problems have given a bad name to litigation itself. Often, alternative dispute resolution (ADR) procedures are followed which give fast relief to the litigants.

In this section, we provide links to many relevant resources.