Natural Language Processing in the Legal Domain
This is an incremental survey paper that provides a comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners in legal NLP, highlighting progress and open questions.
The paper summarizes the state of NLP in the legal domain by analyzing over 600 papers from the past decade, finding trends such as increased paper volume, task diversity, and method sophistication, with Legal NLP beginning to match general NLP standards.
In this paper, we summarize the current state of the field of NLP & Law with a specific focus on recent technical and substantive developments. To support our analysis, we construct and analyze a nearly complete corpus of more than six hundred NLP & Law related papers published over the past decade. Our analysis highlights several major trends. Namely, we document an increasing number of papers written, tasks undertaken, and languages covered over the course of the past decade. We observe an increase in the sophistication of the methods which researchers deployed in this applied context. Slowly but surely, Legal NLP is beginning to match not only the methodological sophistication of general NLP but also the professional standards of data availability and code reproducibility observed within the broader scientific community. We believe all of these trends bode well for the future of the field, but many questions in both the academic and commercial sphere still remain open.