# Legal Fact Prediction: The Missing Piece in Legal Judgment Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.07055 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07055/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00976/) (2021)
- [Neural Legal Judgment Prediction in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02059/) (2019)
- [CAIL2018: A Large-Scale Legal Dataset for Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02478/) (2018)
- [ILDC for CJPE: Indian Legal Documents Corpus for Court Judgment Prediction and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13562/) (2021)
- [Locally Differentially Private Document Generation Using Zero Shot Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16111/) (2023)
- [Learning to Predict Charges for Criminal Cases with Legal Basis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09168/) (2017)
- [Swiss-Judgment-Prediction: A Multilingual Legal Judgment Prediction Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00806/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Legal Judgment Prediction: Datasets, Metrics, Models and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04859/) (2022)
- [A Multi-Task Benchmark for Korean Legal Language Understanding and Judgement Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05224/) (2022)
- [Charge-Based Prison Term Prediction with Deep Gating Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11521/) (2019)
- [Plain English Summarization of Contracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00424/) (2019)
- [Legal Judgment Prediction with Multi-Stage CaseRepresentation Learning in the Real Court Setting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05192/) (2021)
- [Automatic Judgment Prediction via Legal Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06537/) (2018)
- [ClassActionPrediction: A Challenging Benchmark for Legal Judgment Prediction of Class Action Cases in the US](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00582/) (2022)
- [Exploiting Contrastive Learning and Numerical Evidence for Confusing Legal Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08238/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Gender Bias in LLMs: Preliminary Evidence from Shared Parenting Scenario in Czech Family Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05879/) (2026)
- [The Cases LJP Never Sees: Prosecution Decision Prediction for More Complete Criminal Liability Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28464/) (2026)
- [Logic-Guided Multistage Inference for Explainable Multidefendant Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12688/) (2026)
- [LegalRewardBench: Benchmarking Reward Models for Legal Preference Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18299/) (2026)
- [How Do LLMs Understand Legal Philosophy? Diagnosing Legal-Philosophical Reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19427/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Legal judgment prediction (LJP), which enables litigants and their lawyers to forecast judgment outcomes and refine litigation strategies, has emerged as a crucial legal NLP task. Existing studies typically utilize legal facts, i.e., facts that have been established by evidence and determined by the judge, to predict the judgment. However, legal facts are often difficult to obtain in the early stages of litigation, significantly limiting the practical applicability of fact-based LJP. To address this limitation, we propose a novel legal NLP task: legal fact prediction (LFP), which takes the evidence submitted by litigants for trial as input to predict legal facts, thereby empowering fact-based LJP technologies to make predictions in the absence of ground-truth legal facts. We also propose the first benchmark dataset, LFPBench, for evaluating the LFP task. Our extensive experiments on LFPBench demonstrate the effectiveness of LFP-empowered LJP and highlight promising research directions for LFP.