Generating Intelligible Plumitifs Descriptions: Use Case Application with Ethical Considerations
This work aims to make legal case summaries more understandable for the general public and potentially legal professionals, by translating abbreviated and code-heavy documents into plain language. This is an incremental improvement in accessibility for legal documents.
This paper addresses the challenge of making publicly accessible but difficult-to-understand Canadian judicial plumitifs (dockets) intelligible. It proposes a multi-source language generation architecture that combines plumitif content with the Criminal Code of Canada to produce readable descriptions.
Plumitifs (dockets) were initially a tool for law clerks. Nowadays, they are used as summaries presenting all the steps of a judicial case. Information concerning parties' identity, jurisdiction in charge of administering the case, and some information relating to the nature and the course of the preceding are available through plumitifs. They are publicly accessible but barely understandable; they are written using abbreviations and referring to provisions from the Criminal Code of Canada, which makes them hard to reason about. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient multi-source language generation architecture that leverages both the plumitif and the Criminal Code's content to generate intelligible plumitifs descriptions. It goes without saying that ethical considerations rise with these sensitive documents made readable and available at scale, legitimate concerns that we address in this paper.