# Multi-LexSum: Real-World Summaries of Civil Rights Lawsuits at Multiple Granularities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.10883 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10883/

## Key facts

- Cited by 47 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (2020)
- [Training Deep Nets with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06174/) (2016)
- [Abstractive Text Summarization Using Sequence-to-Sequence RNNs and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06023/) (2016)
- [A Discourse-Aware Attention Model for Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05685/) (2018)
- [Multi-News: a Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset and Abstractive Hierarchical Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01749/) (2019)
- [Efficient Attentions for Long Document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02112/) (2021)
- [LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00976/) (2021)
- [Newsroom: A Dataset of 1.3 Million Summaries with Diverse Extractive Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11283/) (2018)
- [CUAD: An Expert-Annotated NLP Dataset for Legal Contract Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06268/) (2021)
- [Neural Legal Judgment Prediction in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02059/) (2019)
- [When Does Pretraining Help? Assessing Self-Supervised Learning for Law and the CaseHOLD Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08671/) (2021)
- [BookSum: A Collection of Datasets for Long-form Narrative Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08209/) (2021)
- [BIGPATENT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Abstractive and Coherent Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03741/) (2019)
- [BillSum: A Corpus for Automatic Summarization of US Legislation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00523/) (2019)
- [JEC-QA: A Legal-Domain Question Answering Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12011/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Generative Representational Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09906/) (2024)
- [How to Train Long-Context Language Models (Effectively)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02660/) (2024)
- [HELMET: How to Evaluate Long-Context Language Models Effectively and Thoroughly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02694/) (2024)
- [LegalBench-RAG: A Benchmark for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10343/) (2024)
- [Task-aware Retrieval with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09260/) (2022)
- [LEXTREME: A Multi-Lingual and Multi-Task Benchmark for the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13126/) (2023)
- [Natural Language Processing for the Legal Domain: A Survey of Tasks, Datasets, Models, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21306/) (2024)
- [An Exploration of Hierarchical Attention Transformers for Efficient Long Document Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05529/) (2022)
- [LLMs as Factual Reasoners: Insights from Existing Benchmarks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14540/) (2023)
- [QuantSpec: Self-Speculative Decoding with Hierarchical Quantized KV Cache](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10424/) (2025)
- [OASum: Large-Scale Open Domain Aspect-based Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09233/) (2022)
- [Beyond Summarization: Designing AI Support for Real-World Expository Writing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02623/) (2023)
- [Automated Metrics for Medical Multi-Document Summarization Disagree with Human Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13693/) (2023)
- [CLERC: A Dataset for Legal Case Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Analysis Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17186/) (2024)
- [ClassActionPrediction: A Challenging Benchmark for Legal Judgment Prediction of Class Action Cases in the US](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00582/) (2022)
- [Incorporating Distributions of Discourse Structure for Long Document Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16784/) (2023)
- [One Law, Many Languages: Benchmarking Multilingual Legal Reasoning for Judicial Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09237/) (2023)
- [BudgetLongformer: Can we Cheaply Pretrain a SotA Legal Language Model From Scratch?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17135/) (2022)
- [LawInstruct: A Resource for Studying Language Model Adaptation to the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02127/) (2024)
- [Cache Me If You Can: How Many KVs Do You Need for Effective Long-Context LMs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17121/) (2025)
- [LexAbSumm: Aspect-based Summarization of Legal Decisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00594/) (2024)
- [Context-Aware Hierarchical Merging for Long Document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00977/) (2025)
- [DOLOMITES: Domain-Specific Long-Form Methodical Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05938/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model Prompt Chaining for Long Legal Document Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04138/) (2023)
- [Unlocking Legal Knowledge: A Multilingual Dataset for Judicial Summarization in Switzerland](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13456/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Unintended Memorization with LoRA in Federated Learning for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05087/) (2025)
- [LawngNLI: A Long-Premise Benchmark for In-Domain Generalization from Short to Long Contexts and for Implication-Based Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03222/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Legal Summarization: Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17830/) (2025)
- [AIReg-Bench: Benchmarking Language Models That Assess AI Regulation Compliance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01474/) (2025)
- [GoLongRL: Capability-Oriented Long Context Reinforcement Learning with Multitask Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19577/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the advent of large language models, methods for abstractive summarization have made great strides, creating potential for use in applications to aid knowledge workers processing unwieldy document collections. One such setting is the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse (CRLC) (https://clearinghouse.net),which posts information about large-scale civil rights lawsuits, serving lawyers, scholars, and the general public. Today, summarization in the CRLC requires extensive training of lawyers and law students who spend hours per case understanding multiple relevant documents in order to produce high-quality summaries of key events and outcomes. Motivated by this ongoing real-world summarization effort, we introduce Multi-LexSum, a collection of 9,280 expert-authored summaries drawn from ongoing CRLC writing. Multi-LexSum presents a challenging multi-document summarization task given the length of the source documents, often exceeding two hundred pages per case. Furthermore, Multi-LexSum is distinct from other datasets in its multiple target summaries, each at a different granularity (ranging from one-sentence "extreme" summaries to multi-paragraph narrations of over five hundred words). We present extensive analysis demonstrating that despite the high-quality summaries in the training data (adhering to strict content and style guidelines), state-of-the-art summarization models perform poorly on this task. We release Multi-LexSum for further research in summarization methods as well as to facilitate development of applications to assist in the CRLC's mission at https://multilexsum.github.io.