The Cambridge Law Corpus: A Dataset for Legal AI Research

Andreas Östling, Holli Sargeant, Huiyuan Xie, Ludwig Konrad Bull, Alexander Terenin, Leif Jonsson, Måns Magnusson, Felix Steffek

Keywords: Law, AI, Corpus, Legal Research, dataset

TL;DR: A corpus of UK court decisions for legal and AI research

Abstract: We introduce the Cambridge Law Corpus (CLC), a dataset for legal AI research. It consists of over 250 000 court cases from the UK. Most cases are from the 21st century, but the corpus includes cases as old as the 16th century. This paper presents the first release of the corpus, containing the raw text and meta-data. Together with the corpus, we provide annotations on case outcomes for 638 cases, done by legal experts. Using our annotated data, we have trained and evaluated case outcome extraction with GPT-3, GPT-4 and RoBERTa models to provide benchmarks. We include an extensive legal and ethical discussion to address the potentially sensitive nature of this material. As a consequence, the corpus will only be released for research purposes under certain restrictions.

Submission Number: 265