Case Law Retrieval by Concept Search and Visualization

Technology

Explaining the Relevance of Court Decisions to Laymen

In the context of intelligent disclosure of case law, we report on our findings with respect to the presentation of relevant court decisions back to the laymen users. For this presentation we first localize the relevant legal concepts in the cases using shallow NLP techniques. Hereafter we investigated the use of techniques from the field of recommender systems, i.e. keyword style explanation and influence style explanation, to present the cases to the user in an understandable way. In order to find out if we succeeded in that respect, we conducted a small user satisfaction research. It shows promising results, and gives us some directions for future research

Thesaurus-based Retrieval of Case Law

In the context of intelligent disclosure of case law, we report on our findings on methods for retrieving relevant case law within the domain of tort law from a repository of 68.000 court verdicts. We apply a thesaurus-based technique to find specific legal situations. It appears that statistical measures of term relevance are not sufficient, but that explicit knowledge about specific formulations used in law and case law are required to distinguish relevant case law from irrelevant. In addition, we found out that the retrieving legal concepts with an ``interpretive'' character requires a different method than concepts do not require additional interpretation

Thesaurus-based Retrieval of Case Law

Abstract. In the context of intelligent disclosure of case law, we report on our findings on methods for retrieving relevant case law within the domain of tort law from a repository of 68.000 court verdicts. We apply a thesaurus-based technique to find specific legal situations. It appears that statistical measures of term relevance ar