Legal Document Analysis

Software-based legal assistance systems have leveraged many different forms of knowledge representation and reasoning. This article explores how document automation services rooted in expert system style and other symbolic approaches can usefully enhance and be enhanced by current generative AI approaches. We discuss the possible benefits and challenges, and report on preliminary experiments in using large language models to identify and fix issues in texts written by laypeople.

Regulatory compliance checking - deciding whether a target document satisfies the obligations of a regulation - requires interpreting dense legal text, identifying which provisions apply, and grounding each decision in explicit evidence. We present ARCCS, an end-to-end, automated, agentic, and regulation-agnostic Legal NLP system for compliance checking. ARCCS decomposes raw regulatory text into atomic, traceable requirements and evaluates a target document against them using retrieved evidence, confidence scores, and human-interpretable justifications. This design decouples compliance assessment from any fixed regulatory template or predefined rule set, enabling the pipeline to operate over regulations of varying size and structure. We evaluate ARCCS in two complementary settings. First, in a GDPR policy-document evaluation, LLM-based judges find its decisions and justifications legally and evidentially consistent in up to 96.67% of the assessed cases. Second, on an EU public-procurement benchmark comprising more than 1,200 individual rule checks, the system attains 98.8% accuracy in violation detection. ARCCS is, to our knowledge, the first fully open-source system for end-to-end regulatory compliance checking and auditable report generation.

U.S. employment-discrimination complaints describe complex event sequences that are not explicitly captured by lexical or embedding-based representations alone. We present ARGUS, a source-grounded pipeline that combines a 5W1H-inspired schema, legal-domain models, and LLM-based structured generation to construct document-level Event Knowledge Graphs (EKGs) from CourtListener complaints. ARGUS extracts fact-bearing statements, builds chunk-level event graphs with participant, temporal, and causal structure, and merges them into document-level representations. We evaluate graph quality through human and multi-model assessment and test downstream utility on claim classification and legal QA. The graph-structured classifier outperforms raw and linearized baselines on the held-out set, and EKG-only retrieval improves document-scoped QA, while open-retrieval gains remain limited by low first-stage candidate recall. These results suggest that EKGs are most useful for organizing and reasoning over evidence once relevant material has been retrieved.

Legal contracts are structurally complex documents in which contradictions may emerge across distant and interconnected provisions. Although large language models (LLMs) improve legal language understanding, contradiction analysis remains a human-centered and evidence-grounded review task. We present ContraVis, a visual analytics system for human-in-the-loop contradiction analysis in legal contracts. The system models contracts as typed paragraph graphs that combine explicit contractual references with semantic relationships between paragraphs. This graph plays a dual role: it conditions LLM reasoning and serves as the interactive representation the analyst explores, keeping model context and human inspection aligned across coordinated views. In a controlled comparison, graph-conditioned reasoning recovered more injected contradictions than standalone LLM analysis as contract length grew, while surfacing additional candidates for analyst validation. A formative study with contract-domain lawyers indicated that in-context evidence comparison supported contradiction validation, and we distill design implications for evidence-grounded, LLM-assisted document review.

Legal argument mining supports passage classification, retrieval, and argument completion. This work introduces an expert-annotated dataset of 42 U.S. federal tax opinions on corporate reorganizations under I.R.C. §368. To our knowledge, it is the first expert-annotated, tree-structured argument corpus for this domain. Explicit spans receive one of five functional labels: Rule, Analysis, Conclusion, Background Facts, and Procedural History. Rule, Analysis, and Conclusion spans can be linked into directed support trees, while Background Facts and Procedural History serve a contextual function. The corpus provides span-based, sentence-based, flat, and tree-structured representations. Agreement analysis shows that functional node labels are more reliable than directed support edges and implicit intermediate conclusions. Directed-path agreement is stronger than direct-edge agreement, which indicates that broad reachability is more stable than exact local decomposition. Classification experiments show that functional labels are learnable under case-disjoint evaluation. Retrieval experiments show that supervised fine-tuning improves within-case retrieval. However, cross-case generalization remains weak. The dataset supports legal passage classification and provides a conservative benchmark for structured argument mining in U.S. federal tax case law.

Land ownership in Bangladesh is recorded in Ana-Ganda-Kora-Kranti-Til, a base-16 positional fraction system with dedicated Unicode glyphs, no mainstream font, and no coverage in any OCR pipeline or tokenizer. The handwritten records that carry these fractions, RS Khatians, are the authoritative title record for millions of parcels and a frequent subject of civil litigation, yet no benchmark has asked whether a machine can read one. We introduce KhatianDoc, a four-task benchmark built from 107 real RS Khatian records from the Vumi (land) Office of Munshiganj, Bangladesh: symbol recognition, base-16-to-decimal conversion, structured field extraction, and legal document question answering over 1,634 QA pairs. Ground truth was transcribed by hand, verified by a land-law practitioner to full agreement, and anonymized through positional tokens that keep the referential distinctions multi-hop questions depend on. We evaluate six multimodal LLMs (8B to 72B+, open and closed) under a fixed zero-shot protocol. Five QA categories, 39.3% of our stratified set, return zero correct answers from every model; on the arithmetic task, every model that emits a number does worse than a constant-mean baseline, with exact- and near-match scores coinciding: decorrelation, not approximation. Auditing our own metrics surfaced two artifacts in opposite directions: we correct a refusal-scoring bug and report the fixed scores beside the originals, and flag an inflated metadata metric as an upper bound. KhatianDoc documents not a performance gap but the absence of a capability, with verified ground truth for future systems. Code and data, with a redacted image release, are publicly available.

Statutes are increasingly parsed by machines before people read them, and the parsers disagree: on Missouri's statutes, two independently written extractors diverge on numeric-threshold presence at a false-negative rate of 0.43. We ask what formal logic survives such noise. We build a passive survival certificate for the Duquenne-Guigues implication basis of machine-extracted statutory contexts: per-attribute inter-extractor disagreement is measured, replayed against the basis in 1,000 Monte Carlo trials, and an implication is certified only when a one-sided Wilson 95% lower bound on survival reaches 0.95; every certified implication carries premise spans and a minimal counterexample. On 29,365 Missouri sections and 502 Indian central-Act sections, the preregistered held-out gate passes (10 statute families across 7 Titles exact; 16 across 11 with 5% tolerance), yet under one globally deployed error model 93.2% of held-out chapters fall below the informativeness floor, and a 2x2 factorial assigns that to calibration-rate transfer, not selection. The certificate is usable but fragile: deploy it per-chapter-calibrated or error-tolerant. Code, data products, and the audit trail, including one retracted claim, are released.

Privacy documents (e.g., privacy policies) are a central mechanism through which digital services disclose data practices and seek user consent. Over the past decades, research on privacy documents has expanded significantly, encompassing not only traditional privacy policies but also short notices (e.g., privacy labels) and interface-level transparency mechanisms. As this research area continues to grow, it has become increasingly difficult to obtain a coherent view of how privacy documents are created, analyzed, evaluated, and maintained across their lifecycle. This SoK provides a unified, lifecycle-oriented view of privacy documents from a software engineering perspective. We systematically review and analyze 290 papers published between 2010 and 2025, organizing them around five research questions that examine how privacy documents are (1) defined and scoped, (2) generated, (3) analyzed and extracted, (4) checked for inconsistencies and noncompliance, and (5) evaluated and improved for usability. Building on our findings, we identify 15 key research trends and 21 open opportunities. We further chart four broader research directions that highlight (i) emerging challenges in AI-centric platforms, (ii) the need for diverse and up-to-date data foundations, (iii) LLM-based unified policy-code analysis, and (iv) dual usability for end-users and developers. We hope this SoK provides a shared foundation for future research on privacy policies and privacy documents.

Notice-and-comment rulemaking gives any affected party the same formal right to influence federal regulation, but formal access is not substantive capacity to shape rule text. Existing strategies operate at the rule or aggregate-corpus level, too coarse to capture the discrete regulatory obligations where commenters seek change. We introduce obligation-level responsiveness auditing, an auditable, AI-assisted framework for measuring whether public-comment engagement co-occurs with changes to specific regulatory duties. The framework extracts proposed and final-rule obligations, matches comments to the obligations they address, and classifies proposed-final outcomes; each load-bearing component is evaluated against blind human judgment. We apply the framework to 70,075 comments across 36 EPA anchor rulemakings, drawn from a corpus of 786,197 comments across 6,145 dockets from 2010-2022. Three descriptive findings emerge. First, engagement is associated with revision at a modest within-docket magnitude. Second, support-versus-opposition direction does not clearly differentiate outcomes, an informative null inconsistent with simple preference-aggregation. Third, under a permissive reconstruction of commenter type, organizational-majority engagement concentrates in editorial-refinement rather than substantive-modification outcomes at the cross-docket level. A blind human audit of the load-bearing outcome contrast preserves this third finding under corrected labels and reveals that text-similarity methods are insufficient for distinguishing editorial from substantive regulatory change, a measurement-validity lesson we treat as a supporting methodological contribution. Together, these findings locate the equity asymmetry upstream of agency response: in differential capacity across commenter populations to identify, interpret, and contest specific legal obligations.

The automatic structural analysis of legal texts is a cornerstone of legal technology, yet the extraction of their logical components remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce the task of identifying and segmenting legal conditions (Tatbestand) and legal consequences (Rechtsfolge) within German statutory texts. To support this task, we present ANNOTARES (Annotations of Tatbestand-Rechtsfolge Sequences), a novel dataset comprising German law texts with span-level annotations. Spanning three distinct legal codes, the dataset is designed to evaluate both domain-specific performance and cross-statute generalizability. We benchmark diverse architectural approaches: a rule-based baseline, CRFs, BiLSTMs, BiLSTM-CRF, and modern Transformer-based models, including BERT variants and LLM-based methods. Our results demonstrate that BERT and LLM-based models achieve superior performance in capturing the complex syntactic structures of legal language. We release our dataset to facilitate further research in automated legal reasoning.

In this paper, we mainly concentrate on finding concepts or topics from the legal case proceedings, since adopting a structured representation for legal documents, as opposed to a mere bag-of-words flat text representation, can significantly enhance processing capabilities. To achieve this objective, we put forward a set of diverse concepts for legal case proceedings. With this motivation, we propose LeDA, a system for Legal Data Annotation. The system offers the generic functionality of annotating and adjudicating entities or concepts within documents via a web-based interface. A novel feature of our system is that it allows to dynamic create new tags for annotation, which is a particularly useful provision for situations where there exists no pre-defined ontology for the entities (concepts) that need to be annotated - these being rather discovered by annotators as they continue examining more documents. The system that we demonstrate is currently in use to annotate a set of concepts from legal documents to construct semantic representations of documents as bags of concepts that can then be used for several downstream tasks, such as prior case retrieval, judgment prediction, and so on. Along with the system features in general, we also describe how LeDA was used by 3 assessors to annotate and adjudicate legal concept names from Indian Supreme Court case proceedings.

Empirical legal scholarship increasingly treats judicial text as data, and much of it still runs on sparse, interpretable pipelines (TF-IDF features and linear classifiers) because the textual feature is often the object of study rather than a means to a prediction. Yet these pipelines inherit preprocessing defaults from mid-century information retrieval that were never validated against classification accuracy. The most entrenched of these is stopword removal. This study introduces an exhaustive single-word ablation that measures a preprocessing step's effect directly against the downstream objective, and applies it to stopword removal. Matching Supreme Court Database labels to Caselaw Access Project opinion texts, the study examines two binary tasks, ideological direction (no-removal baseline F1 about 0.68) and constitutional versus non-constitutional law type (about 0.92), across 7,668 and 7,001 opinions. For each task, the ablation removes each of roughly 18,500 candidate words in turn, and a task-specific stoplist is built from the resulting measurements. Generic stoplists in common use fall below the no-removal baseline on held-out opinions in all twelve tests. The task-specific stoplists move held-out F1 by +0.0023 (95% CI [-0.0124, +0.0170]) on ideology and by +0.0001 ([-0.0082, +0.0085]) on law type. Neither task shows a detectable benefit from removal, and a supplemental analysis finds that word-level statistics predict a word's removal effect poorly, because the words' true removal effects differ by less than the measurement can register. The method generalizes to any inherited preprocessing default, and the result is a caution specific to interpretable legal text-as-data, where a step that reshapes which features a model sees can distort the doctrinal and ideological signal the research is meant to recover. The burden of proof sits with removal.

Automated analyses of privacy policies enable large-scale assessments of transparency in digital ecosystems, yet existing auditing pipelines remain predominantly English-centric. This limits their ability to systematically evaluate multilingual environments, as in the European Union, where many services disclose privacy practices only in local languages. This paper examines whether large language models (LLMs) can extend privacy policy analysis beyond English without requiring language-specific adaptation, thus empowering large-scale auditing in linguistically diverse app ecosystems. We assemble an evaluation corpus spanning all 24 official EU languages from translated versions of two established expert-annotated datasets (OPP-115 and MAPP) and assess translation fidelity through automated metrics and targeted legal-expert review. Our LLM-based classifier for identifying categories of personal data collection achieves stable cross-lingual performance, with macro-F1 scores ranging between 0.91 and 0.94. We then leverage this capability in a large-scale audit of 2,611 Android applications from the Spanish Google Play Store. Combining multilingual privacy policy analysis with the evaluation of corresponding privacy labels and runtime network traffic exposes an important linguistic barrier: public-sector apps predominantly provide privacy policies in Spanish, whereas popular commercial apps mostly provide them in English. We reveal systematic discrepancies between declared and observed practices, especially in public-sector apps. Overall, our results indicate how English-only privacy audits can systematically obfuscate transparency gaps in multilingual environments.

We present the Bangladesh Legal Acts Dataset (BLAD), a curated collection of 1{,}484 legislative acts enacted between 1799 and 2025. Each act is represented with its full text, structured sections and footnotes, repeal status, and metadata linking it to the governing regime, head of state, and prevailing legal framework at the time of enactment. The corpus spans English, Bengali, and mixed-language documents, supporting temporal and multilingual analysis of statutory law. BLAD addresses a persistent gap in legal natural language processing (NLP) resources for low-resource, civil-law jurisdictions in South Asia. We describe the acquisition and enrichment pipeline, report descriptive statistics over more than two centuries of legislation, and outline the research directions the corpus enables. The dataset is publicly available under the CCBY-SA4.0 license at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/sakhadib/bangladesh-legal-acts-dataset.

The advent of LLMs has significantly changed the research on privacy policy and data compliance analysis by enabling tasks that previously required specialized, domain-specific tools. However, it remains unclear to what extent LLMs can truly replicate the diverse functionalities, and the wide range of methodologies and analysis offered by prior work. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic evaluation of whether off-the-shelf LLMs can replace specialized privacy analysis tools. We study six representative tools spanning three major functionalities: contradiction detection, regulatory compliance analysis, and privacy policy summarization and aggregation, and across three intermediate tasks: structured data extraction using tuples, Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) and manual privacy policy labeling. We compare the performance of two state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-5.2 and Gemini-2.5 in various configurations) against the tools by directly prompting the models to perform corresponding functionalities and tasks on a custom dataset of 10 privacy policies, allowing us to assess whether off-the-shelf models can produce tool-specific functionalities without further engineering or domain-specific training, major limitations in prior work. Our results show that LLMs consistently match or exceed the capabilities of existing tools across the functionalities. In manual labeling of first-party collection entities, LLMs achieved an average precision of 81.8% and recall of 70.9%, while for labeling of third-party sharing entities, they achieved an average precision of 91.4% and recall of 70.8% compared to the OPP-115 dataset. Overall, our findings indicate that LLMs can effectively perform a broad range of functionalities and tasks in privacy policy and regulation analysis that previously required specialized tools.

Much empirical legal research depends on translating unstructured text into structured variables. In corporate governance research as elsewhere, this translation has traditionally relied on human coding of documents such as charters and bylaws, a process that is costly, difficult to scale, and often opaque. This paper introduces DECODEM, a set of benchmark datasets for evaluating the automated extraction of corporate governance variables from organizational documents. The benchmarks pair randomly sampled corporate charters and bylaws with high-quality human annotations covering a range of governance provisions commonly studied in empirical work. Using these datasets, the paper evaluates several large-language-model extraction pipelines that vary in prompt design, task decomposition, and document handling. The underlying task consists of a set of document-level binary classification problems, one for each governance variable. The results show that automated extraction is feasible at a high level of accuracy for many provisions, with median performance near the upper bound across approaches. At the same time, performance varies systematically across variables, with a small number of provisions accounting for most of the remaining errors. More elaborate prompting strategies and cascading pipelines do not consistently improve performance for frontier models, but substantially narrow the gap between frontier and efficiency-oriented models in some settings, suggesting that pipeline design can partly substitute for model capability. By providing a standardized benchmark and a systematic evaluation of extraction methods, the paper demonstrates that current frontier models can extract legally meaningful information from complex corporate documents with high accuracy and suggests an important future role for automated feature extraction in constructing corporate governance datasets.

Legal precedent retrieval is a fundamental task in legal case preparation, planning, litigation strategy, and legal research. Current approaches for automatic precedent retrieval map legal documents to a low-dimensional semantic space and compute similarity based on the proximity of their representations. These approaches treat legal documents as monolithic texts, ignoring the rhetorical organization of the legal technicalities. Ergo, they overlook nuanced legal meanings and fail to distinguish the contextual significance of legal entities and concepts that vary based on their rhetorical roles within the document. To address this insufficiency, we propose the PRecG pipeline that computes the similarity between pairs of legal judgments by hierarchically learning their representations. The process begins by decomposing each document into distinct semantic units (segments) based on the rhetorical roles of sentences. For each rhetorical segment, a knowledge graph is constructed to capture the legal entities and their relationships within the segment. Contextual representations of the entities are then learned and aggregated to derive segment-level embeddings. These embeddings are further integrated to produce a unified document-level representation, and finally, the semantic similarity between a pair of documents is computed. We validate the performance of the proposed approach through extensive experiments on a benchmark Indian legal dataset, comparing it against state-of-the-art baselines to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Answering questions over a set of transactional legal documents is most simply done by injecting the whole corpus into the LLM's context window on every query. That baseline maximises retrieval recall, but its token footprint scales with the corpus rather than the question, and long-context degradation scales with it. We report what it took to replace full-corpus injection in a legal-document analysis system, comparing it against two structured retrieval modes over our proprietary structure-aware chunking: embedding retrieval (NAVEMBED) and LLM navigation over a compact structured index (NAVINDEX). On a 20-question benchmark with verified ground-truth answers, a position-bias-controlled, reference-anchored pairwise judge scored semantic retrieval with reranking tied with injection on 16 of 18 document-bound questions (injection preferred on 2) while attending to 17.3x fewer input tokens (a general-text-embedding (GTE) configuration reaches 29.9x at a lower tie rate); both modes were judged tied on the 2 out-of-scope controls. NAVINDEX was judged tied on all 18 at a 1.61x smaller total token footprint, a ~56x smaller answering context, and 25% lower dollar cost. We derive a closed-form caching-crossover rule: cached injection is cheaper in dollars only while the corpus stays below roughly ten times the retrieval payload. Scope and uncertainty are quantified in Section 8.

Ensuring software compliance with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act) poses a significant challenge, as requirements engineers must translate complex legal text into actionable software requirements - a process that remains largely manual and error-prone in practice. We present an automated regulation-to-requirements pipeline that identifies requirement-bearing clauses in regulatory documents and derives system-agnostic software requirements, accompanied by plain-language explanations, traceable to their legal sources. We evaluate the pipeline on the full clause sets of the GDPR (398 clauses) and the EU AI Act (574 clauses). For requirement-bearing clause identification, the approach achieves macro-averaged F1 scores of 0.82 and 0.78, respectively, outperforming a SetFit-based baseline. Human evaluation shows high completeness (4.60 and 4.45) and correctness (3.74 and 3.54) of derived requirements, while explanation clarity scores are near-ceiling (4.92 and 4.94) on a 1-5 scale. We implement the approach in Reg2Req, a publicly released tool that further supports requirement classification, use case seeding, cross-reference analysis, definition indexing, and a traceability matrix to operationalize regulatory compliance in practice. A user study with 25 practitioners shows that the plain-language explanations significantly improve comprehension of derived requirements and confidence in acting on them (p < 0.001), and that all participants would use Reg2Req as a starting point for deriving software requirements from a regulation.

Policy-grounded document review requires determining whether a target document complies with organization-specific policies, guidelines, or playbooks. While large language models can assist with policy interpretation and document analysis, end-to-end prompting leaves the applied policy logic implicit, making compliance decisions difficult to inspect, update, and test. We present PolicyGuard, a neuro-symbolic framework for policy-grounded document compliance review. PolicyGuard converts organizational policy guidance into an executable review engine consisting of typed relational logic rules and atom-level extraction questions. During review, LLMs answer these local questions using retrieved document evidence, and a symbolic evaluator applies the formal rules to detect non-compliance. We instantiate and evaluate PolicyGuard on company-specific NDA compliance review, where contract clauses must be checked against organization-specific negotiation policies. By separating policy formalization, local document interpretation, and symbolic compliance evaluation, PolicyGuard makes document review more explicit, maintainable, and systematically testable.

Reviewing nuclear regulatory documents requires multi-hop reasoning across tens of thousands of pages, where judgments depend on evidence assembled across multiple chapters. We frame this task as planning: an LLM-based agent observes the evidence collected so far, picks the next document fragment to inspect, and stops when the evidence is sufficient. The agent operates over a vectorless document tree using browse, read, and search tools, and maintains a dynamic knowledge graph (KG) as state. On a 200-question benchmark over NuScale Final Safety Analysis Report (FSAR) documents, the system reaches 81.5% accuracy with a RAGAS Faithfulness of 0.93. The dominant performance factor is planning: against PageIndex, which uses the same document tree without state-conditioned action selection, the gap is +38.0pp (43.5% to 81.5%, p<0.001). The system also outperforms LightRAG (73.0%, p<0.05), HippoRAG (70.5%, p<0.01), and GraphRAG (49.5%, p<0.001), and matches RAPTOR (75.5%, p=0.11) without offline indexing. Edge inference adds 2.8x cost without raising accuracy; we retain it as a traceability module. Of 7,391 inferred edges, 3 Violates edges (0.04%) flag scope boundaries (Q058) and partial conformance (Q176) as typed annotations that a human reviewer can audit.

Progress in legal AI increasingly depends on access to authoritative legal text at scale. Yet one of the most consequential layers of American law remains largely absent from existing machine-readable corpora: local ordinances. Local codes govern zoning, housing, business licensing, public health, noise, animal control, and many other domains of everyday regulation, but they are fragmented across vendor platforms designed for human browsing rather than bulk research access. We introduce LOCUS - the Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States - a comprehensive corpus and county-harmonized access layer for U.S. municipal and county ordinance codes. The raw corpus, available for release to researchers, represents nearly all publicly available municipal and county ordinance codes. The resulting raw corpus contains codes from 9,239 cities and counties. A smaller county-harmonized LOCUS access layer provides coverage for the largest 2,309 of 3,144 U.S. counties, accounting for a majority of the population. We use OCR to handle the myriad of document formats that have kept the law from being a public resource. We release the corpus with coverage metadata to support reproducibility, downstream legal AI research, and the incremental expansion of machine-readable access to local law. We train a collection of ModernBERT-based classifiers and scorers to facilitate analyzing U.S. local law among several dimensions, such as opacity and paternalism, that have not previously been studied at this scale. LOCUS-v1 and its derivative models are available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LocalLaws/LOCUS-v1

Multinational companies increasingly require cross-jurisdictional contract review, yet existing legal NLP datasets are largely restricted to a single jurisdiction. We introduce LAUKIN (Legal equivalence dataset of Australia, UK, and INdia), a dataset of clause pairs (AU-UK, UK-IN, IN-AU) labelled for boolean legal equivalence. We develop a novel multi-stage retrieval and reranking pipeline to construct the initial clause pair mapping, with a subset of clause pairs subsequently annotated by legal experts as Equivalent or Not Equivalent. The dataset comprises 14,727 clause pairs from 204 contracts across 8 agreement types, of which 3,000 are manually labelled: 900 train, 600 dev, and 1,500 test. We evaluate 12 models across 4 techniques, achieving a best macro-F1 of 65.11%, establishing LAUKIN as a challenging benchmark. Results reveal that, despite shared legal heritage, drafting conventions diverge significantly across jurisdictions, making cross-jurisdictional equivalence classification non-trivial. LAUKIN also includes 11,727 unlabelled training pairs to support future semi-supervised learning research in legal NLP.

Rule-following agents tasked with executing policies and regulations often fail via Silent Scope Omission (SSO): a model applies a general rule but silently drops nested exceptions or counter-exceptions, producing outputs that appear compliant yet break on important edge cases. Although such failures are often framed as an agentic-systems problem, the underlying bottleneck is statutory and policy understanding, a capability typically studied in legal NLP. However, most existing legal NLP benchmarks emphasize end-task outcomes, which can overlook the structural omissions that cause SSO. To diagnose and mitigate SSO, we introduce NormBench, a benchmark of 2,290 provisions spanning Chinese (laws and local policies), English (U.S. tax law, GDPR, and corporate policies), and cross-lingual settings, designed for defeasible scope parsing: identifying precisely which clause overrides which. NormBench uses Span-Grounded Deontic Trees (SG-DT), a compiler-style intermediate representation that anchors every logical branch to source spans and requires explicit exclusion guards, enabling deterministic compilation and audit. Evaluations of frontier LLMs reveal two recurring pathologies: (1) Recursion Decay, where performance drops sharply as defeater depth increases, and (2) an Auditability Trap, where models retrieve relevant spans but fail to assemble correct control flow. Using SG-DT as a constrained intermediate output improves whole-tree fidelity and defeater recovery, and downstream experiments show that its utility is mechanism-specific: gains concentrate on exception-active, SSO-prone cases, while aggregate accuracy can be mixed when the added structure is unnecessary or parser fidelity is low.

Court judgments are central to legal practice and jurisprudence, yet discourse analysis of Hong Kong judgments has received limited attention, owing largely to the absence of expert-annotated corpora. We introduce the Hong Kong Judgment Discourse Dataset (HKJudge), the first sentence-level expert-annotated legal discourse corpus. HKJudge includes criminal judgments across all five levels of HK's court hierarchy, comprising $\sim$290k sentences and $\sim$6.5 million tokens, fully annotated by legal linguistics experts. We design a two-tier discourse schema that captures what facts a court finds, how it reasons, and what it rules. At the sentence level, each sentence is assigned one of 26 rhetorical roles. At the span level, sentences are further annotated with three sentencing elements (charge, imprisonment term, fine). Ten legal linguistics annotators produced the annotations with an inter-annotator agreement of $κ= 0.8$. We formulate two tasks on HKJudge, termed rhetorical role classification and legal element extraction, and provide the first benchmark evaluation of four BERT-based models, two open-source LLMs under zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, and four commercial LLMs on both tasks. Our work demonstrates the value of sentence-level discourse annotation for modeling the structure of HK judgments and provides a rich data foundation for future work on legal judgment prediction. The HKJudge dataset and code are available at https://github.com/xuanxixi/HKJudge.

Extracting reporting obligations from EU legislation is critical for assessing and reducing regulatory reporting burden. However, distinguishing reporting requirements from structurally similar provisions requires specialised legal understanding. Current legal NLP methods lack specialised datasets with clear guidelines and comparative evaluation of extraction paradigms and domain adaptation strategies. We curate EURO-5K, a corpus of sentence-level reporting obligations and challenging negative examples from 136 EU legislative acts. On this dataset, we train and compare discriminative token-classification models (BERT-style) and generative span-extraction models (LLMs), evaluating both full fine-tuning and parameter-efficient QLoRA against baselines (pattern and dependency-based extraction, few-shot prompting). Results show that fully fine-tuned generic and legal BERT models achieve similar performance (0.89 F1), while fine-tuned LLMs match encoder accuracy for sentence-level extraction. Legal pretraining offers only small gains for generative models. In contrast, it is clearly beneficial when adaptation capacity is constrained, as parameter-efficient tuning of Legal-BERT outperforms its generic counterpart. Learning curve analysis demonstrates that legal pretraining accelerates early learning with minimal data. All approaches converge around 3K samples with diminishing returns thereafter, validating dataset sufficiency. Cross-dataset evaluation on two external regulatory corpora shows that our models behave as specialised reporting obligation extractors rather than generic regulatory classifiers. We release EURO-5K, trained models, and an interactive demo with explainability visualizations and structured RDF export. These demonstrate that both paradigms and parameter-efficient training provide practical tools for regulatory compliance automation.

Citation extraction tools are designed for the structured end-of-document bibliographies of the natural sciences, but law and humanities scholarship cites references primarily in footnotes, where bibliographic data is interleaved with commentary and cross-references and varies widely across languages and styles. To address the scarcity of suitable gold-standard resources, we present FOSSIL (Footnote-based Open-access SSH Scientific Instance Labels), an openly licensed multilingual dataset of 96 annotated scholarly articles containing over 7,600 footnote-embedded references, together with PDF-TEI Editor (a collaborative web annotation tool), a documented seven-annotator workflow, and a Grobid specialization for footnote-based citations. In end-to-end evaluation, the specialized pipeline nearly doubles extraction quality over default Grobid (micro-F1 from 0.36 to 0.72), driven largely by improved recall, while showing that substantial headroom remains for cross-references and mixed-content footnotes. This extended abstract presents work in progress; annotations of citations segmentation and parsing, and cross-reference resolution are ongoing.

Statutory references are central to legal language understanding, but are difficult to process automatically, as they appear in compact and variable surface forms, may combine multiple targets, use special abbreviations, and often point to lower-level units. Existing tools for German focus either on parsing references from legal documents or accessing statutory text once citations are explicit. This paper introduces bundesrecht, an open resource for German statutory reference processing, consisting of a software library and a structured corpus of German federal law. The library parses, normalizes, and resolves German statutory references, mapping raw citation strings to structured objects, expanding compact references into canonical forms, and linking them to statutory provisions. The accompanying dataset preserves the internal hierarchy of statutes from laws to fine-granular subclauses. We evaluate the parser and normalizer on 2,944 annotated German legal references using strict exact-match and micro information extraction metrics. We further evaluate canonical reference deduplication and show that normalized references group real citation surface variants far more reliably than string matching. bundesrecht is the first open resource that covers German statutory reference processing as an end-to-end pipeline, from raw citation string to resolved statutory provision, and is available on PyPI.

Public consultations generate large volumes of data in the form of stakeholder submissions that are practically unfeasible to analyse manually. We present an end-to-end LLM-based pipeline and interactive dashboard for structured topic extraction from regulatory consultation submissions, demonstrated on the European Commission's Digital Fairness Act (DFA) public call for evidence as a case study. The system processes raw PDF attachments and web-form responses, extracts topic annotations, and grounds every extraction in a verbatim quote from the source text. Applied to 4,322 DFA submissions, the pipeline produced 15,368 topic annotations supported by 20,951 verbatim evidence quotes. Three principles govern the proposed design: verbatim grounding, full traceability, and transparency by design. The dashboard exposes the full extraction dataset through five analytical views, from dataset-level topic overviews to individual paragraph drill-downs, with every result traceable to its source. Beyond the predefined DFA topic categories, the pipeline generated certain stakeholder concerns, such as Age Verification, Payment Processor Censorship, and Digital Ownership, that a fixed-taxonomy approach would have missed. The pipeline is domain-generic; adapting it to a new consultation requires only a prompt update and a new dataset. A live demo is available at https://dfa-dashboard.thalesbertaglia.com/. The code and processed data are publicly available at https://github.com/thalesbertaglia/dfa-dashboard.

This study introduces a novel architecture of KAN-based BiGRU model for the task of classification and summarization of legal documents in a low-resource multilingual setup. In order to tackle problems associated with domain language, the usage of different languages, long dependencies within context, and class imbalance, we employ the dataset composed of legal documents from Bangladesh and taken from Manupatra, which include Bengali, English, and transliterated Bengali languages. Our classification task involves BiGRU model, along with Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) module, while the summarization part utilizes attention-based GRU, combined with a KAN model head. Classification model yields 67.96% of accuracy and 0.65 F1 score; while ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L measures for summarization yield 0.38, 0.23, and 0.31 F1 scores, correspondingly. Ablation study shows that the use of KAN increases classification accuracy from 57.34% to 67.96%. Moreover, our proposed technique is compared to several baselines, including classical ML algorithms and pretrained language models.