The Law and NLP: Bridging Disciplinary Disconnects
Robert Mahari Dominik Stammbach Elliott Ash Alex 'Sandy' Pentland
Legal practice is intrinsically rooted in the fabric of language, yet legal
practitioners and scholars have been slow to adopt tools from natural language
processing (NLP). At the same time, the legal system is experiencing an access
to justice crisis, which could be partially alleviated with NLP. In this
position paper, we argue that the slow uptake of NLP in legal practice is
exacerbated by a disconnect between the needs of the legal community and the
focus of NLP researchers. In a review of recent trends in the legal NLP
literature, we find limited overlap between the legal NLP community and legal
academia. Our interpretation is that some of the most popular legal NLP tasks
fail to address the needs of legal practitioners. We discuss examples of legal
NLP tasks that promise to bridge disciplinary disconnects and highlight
interesting areas for legal NLP research that remain underexplored.