Predicting Brazilian court decisions
This addresses a hard task for attorneys and law professionals in Brazil, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting Brazilian court decisions and whether they will be unanimous, achieving 79% accuracy (F1-score) on a dataset of 4,043 cases.
Predicting case outcomes is useful but still an extremely hard task for attorneys and other Law professionals. It is not easy to search case information to extract valuable information as this requires dealing with huge data sets and their complexity. For instance, the complexity of Brazil legal system along with the high litigation rates makes this problem even harder. This paper introduces an approach for predicting Brazilian court decisions which is also able to predict whether the decision will be unanimous. We developed a working prototype which performs 79% of accuracy (F1-score) on a data set composed of 4,043 cases from a Brazilian court. To our knowledge, this is the first study to forecast judge decisions in Brazil.