Legal systems worldwide are inundated with exponential growth in cases and documents. There is an imminent need to develop NLP and ML techniques for automatically processing and understanding legal documents to streamline the legal system. However, evaluating and comparing various NLP models designed specifically for the legal domain is challenging. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing : Benchmark for Indian Legal Text Understanding and Reasoning. contains monolingual (English, Hindi) and multi-lingual (9 Indian languages) domain-specific tasks that address different aspects of the legal system from the point of view of understanding and reasoning over Indian legal documents. We present baseline models (including LLM-based) for each task, outlining the gap between models and the ground truth. To foster further research in the legal domain, we create a leaderboard (available at: https://exploration-lab.github.io/IL-TUR/ ) where the research community can upload and compare legal text understanding systems.

Automatic Charge Identification (ACI) is the task of identifying the relevant charges given the facts of a situation and the statutory laws that define these charges, and is a crucial aspect of the judicial process. Existing works focus on learning charge-side representations by modeling relationships between the charges, but not much effort has been made in improving fact-side representations. We observe that only a small fraction of sentences in the facts actually indicates the charges. We show that by using a very small subset (< 3%) of fact descriptions annotated with sentence-level charges, we can achieve an improvement across a range of different ACI models, as compared to modeling just the main document-level task on a much larger dataset. Additionally, we propose a novel model that utilizes sentence-level charge labels as an auxiliary task, coupled with the main task of document-level charge identification in a multi-task learning framework. The proposed model comprehensively outperforms a large number of recent baselines for ACI. The improvement in performance is particularly noticeable for the rare charges which are known to be especially challenging to identify.