The Law and NLP: Bridging Disciplinary Disconnects
This is an incremental position paper highlighting a problem for legal practitioners and NLP researchers in bridging disciplinary gaps.
The paper identifies a disconnect between the needs of legal practitioners and the focus of NLP researchers, arguing that this slows the adoption of NLP in legal practice, which could help address the access to justice crisis.
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.