How Does NLP Benefit Legal System: A Summary of Legal Artificial Intelligence

TL;DR

This paper reviews the evolution, current state, and future prospects of LegalAI, highlighting how NLP techniques are transforming legal tasks and supporting legal professionals.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of LegalAI, analyzing existing methods, applications, and challenges, and suggests future research directions in the field.

Findings

NLP enhances legal document processing and analysis.

LegalAI applications improve efficiency in legal tasks.

Challenges include data privacy and model interpretability.

Abstract

Legal Artificial Intelligence (LegalAI) focuses on applying the technology of artificial intelligence, especially natural language processing, to benefit tasks in the legal domain. In recent years, LegalAI has drawn increasing attention rapidly from both AI researchers and legal professionals, as LegalAI is beneficial to the legal system for liberating legal professionals from a maze of paperwork. Legal professionals often think about how to solve tasks from rule-based and symbol-based methods, while NLP researchers concentrate more on data-driven and embedding methods. In this paper, we introduce the history, the current state, and the future directions of research in LegalAI. We illustrate the tasks from the perspectives of legal professionals and NLP researchers and show several representative applications in LegalAI. We conduct experiments and provide an in-depth analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of existing works to explore possible future directions. You can find the implementation of our work from https://github.com/thunlp/CLAIM.