Predicting levels of legal case difficulties using machine learning

Abstract

Lawyers play a crucial role in the courtroom, assisting clients in their defense. Because of their lack of legal expertise, a person or organization facing legal issues requires professional aid. However, we need to know how much money will be spent on paying lawyers. The level of complexity in a case can be used to determine lawyer costs. Therefore, in this research, we propose employing machine learning methodologies, i.e., random forest classifiers and support vector machines (SVM), to determine the level of legal case difficulties. The novelty of this research is applying a machine learning approach in predicting the level of difficulty of legal cases. The data utilized consists of 990 records, which are divided into training and testing data in a 90:10 ratio. The term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) approach was then utilized to perform text preprocessing. The text-preprocessing findings are utilized as input in the classification process. According to the research findings, an accuracy value of 85%, a value of weighted average precision is 88%, and a value of weighted average recall is 85%, for support vector machine. Using random forest, we achieve an accuracy value of 89%, a value of weighted average precision is 85.6%, and a value of weighted average recall is 80%.