# Exploring the Use of Text Classification in the Legal Domain

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09306 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09306/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [When Does Pretraining Help? Assessing Self-Supervised Learning for Law and the CaseHOLD Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08671/) (2021)
- [Precedent-Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09241/) (2023)
- [Multi-Defendant Legal Judgment Prediction via Hierarchical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05762/) (2023)
- [Legal Judgment Reimagined: PredEx and the Rise of Intelligent AI Interpretation in Indian Courts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04136/) (2024)
- [JuriBERT: A Masked-Language Model Adaptation for French Legal Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01485/) (2021)
- [Zero-shot Transfer of Article-aware Legal Outcome Classification for European Court of Human Rights Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00609/) (2023)
- [Customizing Contextualized Language Models forLegal Document Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05757/) (2021)
- [LegalRelectra: Mixed-domain Language Modeling for Long-range Legal Text Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08204/) (2022)
- [Towards Explainability and Fairness in Swiss Judgement Prediction: Benchmarking on a Multilingual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17013/) (2024)
- [LegalNLP -- Natural Language Processing methods for the Brazilian Legal Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15709/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Law Article Mining based on Deep Pre-Trained Language Representation Models with Application to the Italian Civil Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03033/) (2021)
- [Multi-class Skin Cancer Classification Architecture Based on Deep Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07520/) (2023)
- [GLARE: Agentic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16383/) (2025)
- [Distinguish Confusion in Legal Judgment Prediction via Revised Relation Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09422/) (2024)
- [LegalGraphRAG: Multi-Agent Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Reliable Legal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28120/) (2026)
- [Incorporating Precedents for Legal Judgement Prediction on European Court of Human Rights Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18644/) (2024)
- [NyayaAnumana & INLegalLlama: The Largest Indian Legal Judgment Prediction Dataset and Specialized Language Model for Enhanced Decision Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08385/) (2024)
- [MARRO: Multi-headed Attention for Rhetorical Role Labeling in Legal Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10659/) (2025)
- [Using attention methods to predict judicial outcomes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08823/) (2022)
- [Autism Disease Detection Using Transfer Learning Techniques: Performance Comparison Between Central Processing Unit vs Graphics Processing Unit Functions for Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00283/) (2023)
- [Towards Grammatical Tagging for the Legal Language of Cybersecurity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17042/) (2023)
- [A Small Claims Court for the NLP: Judging Legal Text Classification Strategies With Small Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05972/) (2024)
- [The Craft of Selective Prediction: Towards Reliable Case Outcome Classification -- An Empirical Study on European Court of Human Rights Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18645/) (2024)
- [The Judge Variable: Challenging Judge-Agnostic Legal Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13732/) (2025)
- [Sequential Multi-task Learning with Task Dependency for Appeal Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07046/) (2022)
- [Low-cost Relevance Generation and Evaluation Metrics for Entity Resolution in AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10298/) (2022)
- [AIDA: Legal Judgment Predictions for Non-Professional Fact Descriptions via Partial-and-Imbalanced Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07728/) (2023)
- [Automatic Detection of Industry Sectors in Legal Articles Using Machine Learning Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05387/) (2023)
- [Towards Supporting Legal Argumentation with NLP: Is More Data Really All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10974/) (2024)
- [Overview of the CAIL 2023 Argument Mining Track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14503/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we investigate the application of text classification methods to support law professionals. We present several experiments applying machine learning techniques to predict with high accuracy the ruling of the French Supreme Court and the law area to which a case belongs to. We also investigate the influence of the time period in which a ruling was made on the form of the case description and the extent to which we need to mask information in a full case ruling to automatically obtain training and test data that resembles case descriptions. We developed a mean probability ensemble system combining the output of multiple SVM classifiers. We report results of 98% average F1 score in predicting a case ruling, 96% F1 score for predicting the law area of a case, and 87.07% F1 score on estimating the date of a ruling.