Applying NLP to Support Legal Decision-making in Administrative Appeal Boards in the EU

While Natural Language Processing (NLP) is being applied in an increasing number of contexts, including law, it remains a difficult task to leverage NLP for the purpose of real-life support of legal decision-making. This is because 1) legal-decision making must be made in a way that is sensitive not only to legislation but also to evolving case practice (prior decision-making that functions as precedent), 2) legal-decision making is sensitive to open-ended legislative language and shifting factual contexts, 3) traditional methods of NLP are capable of processing long texts, but they are suboptimal compared to novel methods, i.e., transformer-based models, e.g., BERT [1], etc. 4) however the transformer-based models are limited by maximum input lengths, which makes it difficult to apply in real-life scenarios, where legal documents exceed the maximum input length. In this paper, we show how we tackle the problem of providing NLP-based intelligence support to legal decision-makers in a real-world setting using transformer-based NLP.