Related papers: Towards Explainability in Legal Outcome Prediction…
In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), predicting judicial outcomes poses significant challenges due to the complexity of legal proceedings and the scarcity of expert-annotated datasets. Addressing this, we introduce…
This work demonstrates that Legal Judgement Prediction systems without expert-informed adjustments can be vulnerable to shallow, distracting surface signals that arise from corpus construction, case distribution, and confounding factors. To…
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is revolutionising the way both professionals and laypersons operate in the legal field. The considerable potential for NLP in the legal sector, especially in developing computational assistance tools for…
Legal rules encompass not only codified statutes but also implicit adjudicatory principles derived from precedents that contain discretionary norms, social morality, and policy. While computational legal research has advanced in applying…
A predictive model makes outcome predictions based on some given features, i.e., it estimates the conditional probability of the outcome given a feature vector. In general, a predictive model cannot estimate the causal effect of a feature…
Legal predictive models are of enormous interest and value to legal community. The stakeholders, specially, the judges and attorneys can take the best advantages of these models to predict the case outcomes to further augment their future…
In high-stakes decision-making tasks within legal NLP, such as Case Outcome Classification (COC), quantifying a model's predictive confidence is crucial. Confidence estimation enables humans to make more informed decisions, particularly…
In the U.S. judicial system, a widespread approach to legal interpretation entails assessing how a legal text would be understood by an `ordinary' speaker of the language. Recent scholarship has proposed that legal practitioners leverage…
This paper looks at a common law legal system as a learning algorithm, models specific features of legal proceedings, and asks whether this system learns efficiently. A particular feature of our model is explicitly viewing various aspects…
We propose a large language model explainability technique for obtaining faithful natural language explanations by grounding the explanations in a reasoning process. When converted to a sequence of tokens, the outputs of the reasoning…
The paper advocates for LLMs to enhance the accessibility, usage and explainability of rule-based legal systems, contributing to a democratic and stakeholder-oriented view of legal technology. A methodology is developed to explore the…
Humans readily generalize, applying prior knowledge to novel situations and stimuli. Advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence have begun to approximate and even surpass human performance, but machine systems reliably…
Organizations developing machine learning-based (ML) technologies face the complex challenge of achieving high predictive performance while respecting the law. This intersection between ML and the law creates new complexities. As ML model…
Prior studies on the effectiveness of professional jury consultants in predicting juror proclivities have yielded mixed results, and few have rigorously evaluated consultant performance against chance under controlled conditions. This study…
Neural networks are among the most accurate supervised learning methods in use today. However, their opacity makes them difficult to trust in critical applications, especially when conditions in training may differ from those in practice.…
Language models (LMs) are said to be exhibiting reasoning, but what does this entail? We assess definitions of reasoning and how key papers in the field of natural language processing (NLP) use the notion and argue that the definitions…
Legal disputes unfold through sequences of filings in which parties update their positions and may settle at any stage. Most computational studies of legal prediction, however, focus on adjudicated outcomes and treat cases as static objects…
Predictive uncertainty estimation of pre-trained language models is an important measure of how likely people can trust their predictions. However, little is known about what makes a model prediction uncertain. Explaining predictive…
Given the complexity of combinations of tasks, languages, and domains in natural language processing (NLP) research, it is computationally prohibitive to exhaustively test newly proposed models on each possible experimental setting. In this…
Machine learning is increasingly used in the legal domain, where it typically operates retrospectively by treating past case outcomes as ground truth. However, legal outcomes are often shaped by human interventions that are not captured in…