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arXiv · 2410.07504

Using LLMs to Discover Legal Factors

Morgan Gray·Jaromir Savelka·Wesley Oliver·Kevin Ashley
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Abstract

Factors are a foundational component of legal analysis and computational models of legal reasoning. These factor-based representations enable lawyers, judges, and AI and Law researchers to reason about legal cases. In this paper, we introduce a methodology that leverages large language models (LLMs) to discover lists of factors that effectively represent a legal domain. Our method takes as input raw court opinions and produces a set of factors and associated definitions. We demonstrate that a semi-automated approach, incorporating minimal human involvement, produces factor representations that can predict case outcomes with moderate success, if not yet as well as expert-defined factors can.

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Morgan Gray, Jaromir Savelka, Wesley Oliver, Kevin Ashley. 2024-10-10. Using LLMs to Discover Legal Factors. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07504

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