Extracting Outcomes from Appellate Decisions in US State Courts

Abstract

Predicting the outcome of a legal process has recently gained considerable research attention. Numerous attempts have been made to predict the exact outcome, judgment, charge, and fines of a case given the textual description of its facts and metadata. However, most of the effort has been focused on Chinese and European law, for which there exist annotated datasets. In this paper, we introduce CASELAW4 — a new dataset of 350k common law judicial decisions from the U.S. Caselaw Access Project, of which 250k have been automatically annotated with binary outcome labels of AFFIRM or REVERSE by our hybrid learning system. To our knowledge, it is the first attempt to perform outcome extraction (a) on such a large volume of English-language judicial opinions, (b) on the Caselaw Access Project data, and (c) on US State Courts of Appeal cases, and it paves the way to large-scale outcome prediction and advanced legal analytics using U.S. Case Law. We set up baseline results for the outcome extraction task on the new dataset, achieving an F-measure of 82.32%.