mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Legal Extractive Summarization of U.S. Court Opinions

arXiv 2305.08428 ↗First posted 15 May 2023cs.CLcited by 9

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Abstract (arXiv)

This paper tackles the task of legal extractive summarization using a dataset of 430K U.S. court opinions with key passages annotated. According to automated summary quality metrics, the reinforcement-learning-based MemSum model is best and even out-performs transformer-based models. In turn, expert human evaluation shows that MemSum summaries effectively capture the key points of lengthy court opinions. Motivated by these results, we open-source our models to the general public. This represents progress towards democratizing law and making U.S. court opinions more accessible to the general public.

Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 13 of its 31 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 May 2023.

Builds on

13 of 31 references.

References · 13

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2019BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehensioncited by 5,874
  3. 2020Longformer: The Long-Document Transformercited by 3,362
  4. 2020Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequencescited by 1,673
  5. 2021LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in Englishcited by 302
  6. 2018Ranking Sentences for Extractive Summarization with Reinforcement Learningcited by 128
  7. 2020How Does NLP Benefit Legal System: A Summary of Legal Artificial Intelligencecited by 128
  8. 2019BillSum: A Corpus for Automatic Summarization of US Legislationcited by 117
  9. 2022Pile of Law: Learning Responsible Data Filtering from the Law and a 256GB Open-Source Legal Datasetcited by 113
  10. 2022An Empirical Survey on Long Document Summarization: Datasets, Models and Metricscited by 74
  11. 2022Processing Long Legal Documents with Pre-trained Transformers: Modding LegalBERT and Longformercited by 20
  12. 2021MemSum: Extractive Summarization of Long Documents Using Multi-Step Episodic Markov Decision Processescited by 19
1 more
  1. 2021Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning for Extractive Legal Summarizationcited by 10

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Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 3; 2025: 4.

9 papers.

  1. 2025LEXam: Benchmarking Legal Reasoning on 340 Law Examscited by 52
  2. 2023Translating Legalese: Enhancing Public Understanding of Court Opinions with Legal Summarizerscited by 8
  3. 2024Exploring the Nexus of Large Language Models and Legal Systems: A Short Surveycited by 6
  4. 2024Unlocking Legal Knowledge: A Multilingual Dataset for Judicial Summarization in Switzerlandcited by 6
  5. 2025A Comprehensive Survey on Legal Summarization: Challenges and Future Directionscited by 6
  6. 2023MemSum-DQA: Adapting An Efficient Long Document Extractive Summarizer for Document Question Answeringcited by 1
  7. 2024Hybrid Deep Learning for Legal Text Analysis: Predicting Punishment Durations in Indonesian Court Rulingscited by 0
  8. 2025Health Insurance Coverage Rule Interpretation Corpus: Law, Policy, and Medical Guidance for Health Insurance Coverage Understandingcited by 0
  9. 2025LLMs in Interpreting Legal Documentscited by 0