# Neural Legal Judgment Prediction in English

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02059 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02059/

## Key facts

- Cited by 209 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 209)

- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00976/) (2021)
- [Analyzing Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00539/) (2023)
- [Challenges and Applications of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10169/) (2023)
- [When Does Pretraining Help? Assessing Self-Supervised Learning for Law and the CaseHOLD Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08671/) (2021)
- [SaulLM-7B: A pioneering Large Language Model for Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03883/) (2024)
- [Lawformer: A Pre-trained Language Model for Chinese Legal Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03887/) (2021)
- [ILDC for CJPE: Indian Legal Documents Corpus for Court Judgment Prediction and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13562/) (2021)
- [Paragraph-level Rationale Extraction through Regularization: A case study on European Court of Human Rights Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13084/) (2021)
- [Calibrated Learning to Defer with One-vs-All Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03673/) (2022)
- [Goal Driven Discovery of Distributional Differences via Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14233/) (2023)
- [Swiss-Judgment-Prediction: A Multilingual Legal Judgment Prediction Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00806/) (2021)
- [MultiLegalPile: A 689GB Multilingual Legal Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02069/) (2023)
- [Legal Prompt Engineering for Multilingual Legal Judgement Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02199/) (2022)
- [Precedent-Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09241/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Legal Judgment Prediction: Datasets, Metrics, Models and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04859/) (2022)
- [PLM-ICD: Automatic ICD Coding with Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05289/) (2022)
- [Multi-LexSum: Real-World Summaries of Civil Rights Lawsuits at Multiple Granularities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10883/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Superhuman Models with Consistency Checks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09983/) (2023)
- [A Multi-Task Benchmark for Korean Legal Language Understanding and Judgement Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05224/) (2022)
- [Natural Language Processing for the Legal Domain: A Survey of Tasks, Datasets, Models, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21306/) (2024)
- [LLM-PBE: Assessing Data Privacy in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12787/) (2024)
- [A Statutory Article Retrieval Dataset in French](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11792/) (2021)
- [AgentsCourt: Building Judicial Decision-Making Agents with Court Debate Simulation and Legal Knowledge Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02959/) (2024)
- [Pre-trained Language Models for the Legal Domain: A Case Study on Indian Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06049/) (2022)
- [An Exploration of Hierarchical Attention Transformers for Efficient Long Document Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05529/) (2022)
- [LawLLM: Law Large Language Model for the US Legal System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21065/) (2024)
- [LEVEN: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Event Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08556/) (2022)
- [The Janus Interface: How Fine-Tuning in Large Language Models Amplifies the Privacy Risks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15469/) (2023)
- [Interpretable Long-Form Legal Question Answering with Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17050/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Legal judgment prediction is the task of automatically predicting the outcome of a court case, given a text describing the case's facts. Previous work on using neural models for this task has focused on Chinese; only feature-based models (e.g., using bags of words and topics) have been considered in English. We release a new English legal judgment prediction dataset, containing cases from the European Court of Human Rights. We evaluate a broad variety of neural models on the new dataset, establishing strong baselines that surpass previous feature-based models in three tasks: (1) binary violation classification; (2) multi-label classification; (3) case importance prediction. We also explore if models are biased towards demographic information via data anonymization. As a side-product, we propose a hierarchical version of BERT, which bypasses BERT's length limitation.