Natural Language Processing in Legal Tech

Abstract

Natural language processing techniques promise to automate an activity that lies at the core of many tasks performed by lawyers, namely the extraction and processing of information from unstructured text. The relevant methods are a key ingredient for both current and future legal tech applications, and their potential and limitations will be crucial in determining the extent to which legal tech will succeed in its quest to revolutionize the market for legal services. This chapter provides a non-technical introduction to a selection of natural language processing techniques that are expected to play a major role in legal tech. In addition, it critically discusses the promises and pitfalls of natural language processing tools in this context, using technology-assisted review in discovery and case outcome predictions as examples.

Keywords: legal tech, nlp, natural language processing

JEL Classification: K00,K10,K19,K40,K49