Litigation Analytics: Extracting and querying motions and orders from US federal courts

Thomas Vacek, Dezhao Song, Hugo Molina-Salgado, Ronald Teo, Conner Cowling, Frank Schilder


Abstract
Legal litigation planning can benefit from statistics collected from past decisions made by judges. Information on the typical duration for a submitted motion, for example, can give valuable clues for developing a successful strategy. Such information is encoded in semi-structured documents called dockets. In order to extract and aggregate this information, we deployed various information extraction and machine learning techniques. The aggregated data can be queried in real time within the Westlaw Edge search engine. In addition to a keyword search for judges, lawyers, law firms, parties and courts, we also implemented a question answering interface that offers targeted questions in order to get to the respective answers quicker.
Anthology ID:
N19-4020
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Waleed Ammar, Annie Louis, Nasrin Mostafazadeh
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
116–121
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-4020
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-4020
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Thomas Vacek, Dezhao Song, Hugo Molina-Salgado, Ronald Teo, Conner Cowling, and Frank Schilder. 2019. Litigation Analytics: Extracting and querying motions and orders from US federal courts. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations), pages 116–121, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Litigation Analytics: Extracting and querying motions and orders from US federal courts (Vacek et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-4020.pdf