Generating Intelligible Plumitifs Descriptions: Use Case Application with Ethical Considerations

TL;DR

This paper presents a multi-source language generation system that transforms complex legal plumitifs into understandable summaries, addressing ethical concerns related to sensitive legal data accessibility.

Contribution

It introduces an innovative architecture combining plumitifs and legal code content to generate clearer legal summaries, enhancing transparency and understanding.

Findings

Effective generation of intelligible legal summaries

Addresses ethical issues in legal data dissemination

Improves accessibility of judicial information

Abstract

Plumitifs (dockets) were initially a tool for law clerks. Nowadays, they are used as summaries presenting all the steps of a judicial case. Information concerning parties' identity, jurisdiction in charge of administering the case, and some information relating to the nature and the course of the preceding are available through plumitifs. They are publicly accessible but barely understandable; they are written using abbreviations and referring to provisions from the Criminal Code of Canada, which makes them hard to reason about. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient multi-source language generation architecture that leverages both the plumitif and the Criminal Code's content to generate intelligible plumitifs descriptions. It goes without saying that ethical considerations rise with these sensitive documents made readable and available at scale, legitimate concerns that we address in this paper.