mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

The Law and NLP: Bridging Disciplinary Disconnects

arXiv 2310.14346 ↗First posted 22 Oct 2023cs.CLcited by 8

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Abstract (arXiv)

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.

Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 18 of its 58 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Oct 2023.

Builds on

18 of 58 references.

References · 18

  1. 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,297
  2. 2021On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Modelscited by 4,033
  3. 2021Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokenscited by 1,293
  4. 2023REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Modelscited by 792
  5. 2021LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in Englishcited by 310
  6. 2021CUAD: An Expert-Annotated NLP Dataset for Legal Contract Reviewcited by 236
  7. 2021The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Researchcited by 172
  8. 2020How Does NLP Benefit Legal System: A Summary of Legal Artificial Intelligencecited by 129
  9. 2018LexNLP: Natural language processing and information extraction for legal and regulatory textscited by 28
  10. 2019Plain English Summarization of Contractscited by 28
  11. 2020A Benchmark for Lease Contract Reviewcited by 26
  12. 2021On the Ethical Limits of Natural Language Processing on Legal Textcited by 26
6 more
  1. 2022Reasoning over Public and Private Data in Retrieval-Based Systemscited by 21
  2. 2020The Role of Pragmatic and Discourse Context in Determining Argument Impactcited by 18
  3. 2021AutoLAW: Augmented Legal Reasoning through Legal Precedent Predictioncited by 14
  4. 2021Goldilocks: Just-Right Tuning of BERT for Technology-Assisted Reviewcited by 12
  5. 2021Context-Aware Legal Citation Recommendation using Deep Learningcited by 12
  6. 2021Evaluating Document Representations for Content-based Legal Literature Recommendationscited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 3; 2025: 3; 2026: 1.

8 papers.

  1. 2025LEXam: Benchmarking Legal Reasoning on 340 Law Examscited by 54
  2. 2024Leveraging Large Language Models for Learning Complex Legal Concepts through Storytellingcited by 23
  3. 2023LePaRD: A Large-Scale Dataset of Judges Citing Precedentscited by 3
  4. 2025Tasks and Roles in Legal AI: Data Curation, Annotation, and Verificationcited by 3
  5. 2024No Argument Left Behind: Overlapping Chunks for Faster Processing of Arbitrarily Long Legal Textscited by 1
  6. 2024Towards Supporting Legal Argumentation with NLP: Is More Data Really All You Need?cited by 0
  7. 2025LLMs for Legal Subsumption in German Employment Contractscited by 0
  8. 2026Legal Domain Adaptation of Modern BERT Modelscited by 0