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Document Type

Book Section

Language

English (en)

Publication Date

2023

Publication Title

Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice

Abstract

Natural language processing techniques promise to automate an activity that lies at the core of many tasks performed by lawyers, namely the extraction and processing of information from unstructured text. The relevant methods are thought to be a key ingredient for both current and future legal tech applications. This chapter provides a non-technical overview of the current state of NLP techniques, focusing on their promise and potential pitfalls in the context of legal tech applications. It argues that, while NLP-powered legal tech can be expected to outperform humans in specific categories of tasks that play to the strengths of current ML techniques, there are severe obstacles to deploying these tools in other contexts, most importantly in tasks that require the equivalent of legal reasoning.

Keywords

Legal Tech, NLP, Computational Methods, Outcome Prediction, TAR, Predictive Coding, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence

Publication Citation

Jens Frankenreiter & Julian Nyarko, Natural Language Processing in Legal Tech, in Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice 70 (David Engstrom ed., 2023)

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