The Law and NLP: Bridging Disciplinary Disconnects

Alex 'Sandy' Pentland; Dominik Stammbach; Elliott Ash; Robert Mahari

The Law and NLP: Bridging Disciplinary Disconnects

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arxiv 2310.14346 v1 pith:VCXKDGPI submitted 2023-10-22 cs.CL

Robert Mahari , Dominik Stammbach , Elliott Ash , Alex 'Sandy' Pentland This is my paper

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keywords legalcommunitydisciplinarydisconnectslanguageneedspracticepractitioners

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Legal practice is intrinsically rooted in the fabric of language, yet legal practitioners and scholars have been slow to adopt tools from natural language processing (NLP). At the same time, the legal system is experiencing an access to justice crisis, which could be partially alleviated with NLP. In this position paper, we argue that the slow uptake of NLP in legal practice is exacerbated by a disconnect between the needs of the legal community and the focus of NLP researchers. In a review of recent trends in the legal NLP literature, we find limited overlap between the legal NLP community and legal academia. Our interpretation is that some of the most popular legal NLP tasks fail to address the needs of legal practitioners. We discuss examples of legal NLP tasks that promise to bridge disciplinary disconnects and highlight interesting areas for legal NLP research that remain underexplored.

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Cited by 1 Pith paper

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

LLMs for Legal Subsumption in German Employment Contracts
cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

LLMs reach 80% weighted F1 on German employment contract clause review when given lawyer-distilled examination guidelines, but lag human lawyers when reading full legal sources.

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