Leveraging LLMs and LegalDocML to extract legal interpretations: a case study on UK legislation and case law
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The increasing volume and complexity of legal texts pose challenges in bridging legislative language with judicial interpretation.This paper introduces a novel methodology, along with a corresponding tool, that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and the LegalDocML format in a twophase approach aimed at extracting legal interpretations of UK legislation within UK case law.The UK Publication Office (The National Archives, TNA) is the single institution in the world providing all its legislation and case law in LegalDocML format.Therefore, the tool is not currently applicable to other jurisdictions.By linking legal terms to their interpretations, the methodology enhances the precision and scalability of legal document annotations, reducing the time and effort typically required for manual annotation.Evaluation results demonstrate high accuracy in identifying and extracting key phrases, showcasing the methodology's effectiveness in addressing the diverse contextual meanings of legal language.This work offers a scalable solution for enriching TNA's LegalDocML datasets while establishing connections between legislation and case law through semantically aligned terms.The tool source code can be accessed through the GitHub repository https://github.com/SafiaK/Odyssey-
Source: Cronfa (Swansea University)
Authors: Livio Robaldo, Safia Kanwal, kuuku Anim
Institution: Swansea University
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7039385175