AI-assisted German Employment Contract Review: A Benchmark Dataset

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new annotated dataset for German employment contract review to facilitate NLP-based legal analysis, addressing the scarcity of expert-annotated legal datasets and providing baseline model evaluations.

Contribution

It provides the first benchmark dataset for German employment contract legality and fairness review, enabling future NLP research in legal document analysis.

Findings

Dataset released for legal clause review in German employment contracts

Baseline NLP models evaluated on the dataset

Facilitates future research in legal NLP applications

Abstract

Employment contracts are used to agree upon the working conditions between employers and employees all over the world. Understanding and reviewing contracts for void or unfair clauses requires extensive knowledge of the legal system and terminology. Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) hold promise for assisting in these reviews. However, applying NLP techniques on legal text is particularly difficult due to the scarcity of expert-annotated datasets. To address this issue and as a starting point for our effort in assisting lawyers with contract reviews using NLP, we release an anonymized and annotated benchmark dataset for legality and fairness review of German employment contract clauses, alongside with baseline model evaluations.