A study tool for law students and trainee lawyers
Structure analysis of judicial reasoning
A language model analyses the reasoning of a judgment sentence by sentence. It identifies the function of each sentence in the court's argument and uses it to set the reading order: from the holding and its conditions to the facts of the case.
How the analysis works
- 1
Segmentation
The text is split into sentences by rules that account for legal abbreviations: art., para., case numbers.
- 2
Document structure
The model reads the whole reasoning and sets the document type, the subject of the case and the categories of the argument. Categories are set for the specific text.
- 3
Sentence classification
Each sentence gets a category and a weight within the argument. Conditions in subordinate clauses and provisos ("unless", "provided that") are picked out separately.
- 4
Verification
The model returns sentence numbers only, and each number is checked against the document. The result consists solely of sentences written by the court.
Study
- Reading order
- The judgment read in the order the analysis sets: the ruling and its conditions, then the reasoning, the grounds of appeal and the circumstances of the case.
- Questions on the judgment
- The model writes questions whose answer is a sentence from the reasoning. Intervals between reviews depend on how well each one was answered.
Sample: a court of appeal judgment, 32 sentences
- holding3%
- conditions24%
- reasoning28%
- grounds of appeal13%
- facts of the case32%
Categories and priorities: annotated by hand. Data source →
Documents
Private documents are deleted 30 days after they were last opened. Their text never enters the application logs.